For my thesis, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “salience”. According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, salience comes from the Latin word salire that means to leap. The word is used with many connotations in different subjects, but generally it is related to something prominent or significant.
Mathematical studies use salience as a term to describe a sudden change in the derivative of a function, as for example in (Large and Palmer 2002).
When it comes to its use in relation to features or events in music, salience has been used in studies of pulse and rhythm perception. In a study of musical performance, Parncutt (1987) found that the tempo slows down near salient events. The performer knows that something “important” is coming, and uses a deceleration in tempo to further enhance the salient point. This is quite often also notated in the score of classical music as ritardando.
A somewhat different connotation of salience is suggested in (Rothgeb 1997), where it is argued that we are often mislead to believe that the most apparent features are salient, but they are not really so important for the projection of the musical message. He further argues that “tonal shapes”, or large-scale structures that are not immediately apparent, are the “true” salient features.
I prefer to stick with a definition of salience as something that is immediately apparent and stands out in our consciousness (Crowther 1995). However, it is important to remember that salience is dependent on context, for example such as Patricia Hanna (2001) points out that something being psychologically salient is not necessarily linguistically salient. When it comes to musical salience, it is probably determined by a number of factors, such as dynamics, pitch, harmony and cadences (Dixon and Cambouropoulos 2000).