Pulse clarity is considered as a high-level musical dimension that conveys how easily in a given musical piece, or a particular moment during that piece, listeners can perceive the underlying rhythmic or metrical pulsation. The objective of this study is to establish a composite model explaining pulse clarity judgments from the analysis of audio recordings, decomposed into a set of independent factors related to various musical dimensions. To evaluate the pulse clarity model, 25 participants have rated the pulse clarity of one hundred excerpts from movie soundtracks. The mapping between the model predictions and the ratings was carried out via regressions. More than three fourth of listeners’ rating variance can be explained with a combination of periodicity-based and nonperiodicity-based factors.

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