Memory for the absolute pitch of familiar songs

Four experiments were conducted to examine the ability of people without "perfect pitch" to retain the absolute pitch of familiar tunes. In Experiment 1, participants imagined given tunes, and then hummed their first notes four times either between or within sessions. The variability of these productions was very low. Experiment 2 used a recognition paradigm, with results similar to those in Experiment 1 for musicians, but with some additional variability shown for unselected subjects. In Experiment 3, subjects rated the suitability of various pitches to start familiar tunes. Previously given preferred notes were rated high, as were notes three or four semitones distant from the preferred notes, but not notes one or two semitones distant. In Experiment 4, subjects mentally transformed the pitches of familiar tunes to the highest and lowest levels possible. These experiments suggest some retention of the absolute pitch of tunes despite a paucity of verbal or visual cues for the pitch.     

The influence of music-elicited emotions and relative pitch on absolute pitch memory for familiar melodies

Levitin's findings that nonmusicians could produce from memory the absolute pitches of self-selected pop songs have been widely cited in the music psychology literature. These findings suggest that latent absolute pitch (AP) memory may be a more widespread trait within the population than traditional AP labelling ability. However, it has been left unclear what factors may facilitate absolute pitch retention for familiar pieces of music. The aim of the present paper was to investigate factors that may contribute to latent AP memory using Levitin's sung production paradigm for AP memory and comparing results to the outcomes of a pitch labelling task, a relative pitch memory test, measures of music-induced emotions, and various measures of participants' musical backgrounds. Our results suggest that relative pitch memory and the quality and degree of music-elicited emotions impact on latent AP memory.     

Semantic priming of familiar songs

We explored the functional organization of semantic memory for music by comparing priming across familiar songs both within modalities (Experiment 1, tune to tune; Experiment 3, category label to lyrics) and across modalities (Experiment 2, category label to tune; Experiment 4, tune to lyrics). Participants judged whether or not the target tune or lyrics were real (akin to lexical decision tasks). We found significant priming, analogous to linguistic associative-priming effects, in reaction times for related primes as compared to unrelated primes, but primarily for within-modality comparisons. Reaction times to tunes (e.g., “Silent Night”) were faster following related tunes (“Deck the Hall”) than following unrelated tunes (“God Bless America”). However, a category label (e.g., Christmas) did not prime tunes from within that category. Lyrics were primed by a related category label, but not by a related tune. These results support the conceptual organization of music in semantic memory, but with potentially weaker associations across modalities.     

Testing the absolute-tempo hypothesis: Context effects for familiar and unfamiliar songs

In two experiments, we investigated context effects on tempo judgments for familiar and unfamiliar songs performed by popular artists. In Experiment 1, participants made comparative tempo judgments to a remembered standard for song clips drawn from either a slow or a fast context, created by manipulating the tempos of the same songs. Although both familiar and unfamiliar songs showed significant shifts in their points of subjective equality toward the tempo context values, more-familiar songs showed significantly reduced contextual bias. In Experiment 2, tempo pleasantness ratings showed significant context effects in which the ordering of tempos on the pleasantness scale differed across contexts, with the most pleasant tempo shifting toward the contextual values, an assimilation of ideal points. Once again, these effects were significant but reduced for the more-familiar songs. The moderating effects of song familiarity support a weak version of the absolute-tempo hypothesis, in which long-term memory for tempo reduces but does not eliminate contextual effects. Thus, although both relative and absolute tempo information appear to be encoded in memory, the absolute representation may be subject to rapid revision by recently experienced tempo-altered versions of the same song.     

Absolute pitch and tempo in mothers' songs to infants

We examined the relative stability of pitch, tempo, and rhythm in maternal speech and singing to prelinguistic infants. Mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. The pitch level and tempo of identical utterances were highly variable across the 1-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in song repetitions. Rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. Mothers' accurate reproduction of their sung performances can be considered a form of absolute pitch and absolute tempo.     

Memory for frequency of hearing popular songs

In two experiments college students were asked to provide situational frequency estimates of 10-s excerpts from rock songs. In both experiments familiarity of the musical selections heard one, two, three, or four times was varied. In Experiment 2 the nature of instructions given to subjects prior to presentation of the musical excerpts was also manipulated. Across both experiments subjects' estimates were less accurate for unfamiliar than for familiar rock music. In Experiment 2 instructions to remember frequency, as well as general memory instructions, resulted in better memory for presentation frequency than did instructions to "ignore" music while working on math problems. Memory for situational frequency was also related to knowledge of rock music as defined by subjects' ability to identify the titles and artists of the presented songs. The present pattern of results with popular music is viewed as similar to that obtained in experiments investigating memory for frequency of verbal stimuli. Although providing support for an automatic processing view of frequency encoding, the results also implicate meaningful elaboration of stimuli as an important determinant of memory for frequency of events.     

Training the absolute identification of pitch

Two methods for training the absolute judgment of pitch, reference training and series training, were studied. Reference training concentrated during training on the identification of three reference tones in a set of nine pure tones, while series training gave equal weight during training to the identification of all nine tones. Results of pre- and posttraining tests, scored for the number of correct judgments, showed that reference training was more effective than series training for listeners with musical experience. In addition, discriminability (d′) scaling of pre- and posttest performance indicated that reference training was particularly effective for training listeners with musical experience when the nine tones of a set were grouped into three pitch classes—high, medium, and low pitch. Listeners without musical experience benefited from both training methods, but their overall improvement was less than that for musical listeners.     

Memory for the pitch of a tone

Observers attempted to detect the presence of a pitch difference between two successive tones. The percentage of correct judgments was equivalent for tones separated by .95, 4.5, and 8.9 sec. There was a general increase in reports of a pitch difference with increased intertone interval, which is interpreted as arising from hypothesized shifts in the neural locus of the first stimulus during the intertone interval.     

Memory for the pitch of a tone

Observers attempted to detect the presence of a pitch dirference between two successive tones. The percentage of correct judgments was equivalent for tones separated by 95, 4.5, and 8.9 sec. There was a general increase in reports of a pitch difference with increased intertone interval, which is interpreted as arising from hypothesized shifts in the neural locus of the first stimulus during the intertone interval.     

The organisation of musical semantic memory: Evidence from false memories for familiar songs

By adapting a well-known paradigm for studying memory for words—the Deese-Roediger-McDermott or DRM paradigm (Deese, 1959, Roediger & McDermott, 1995)—the two experiments reported here explore memory for song titles and song clips. Participants were presented with five song titles (Experiment 1a) or five 30-second song clips (Experiment 1b) for each of nine popular artists (e.g., Robbie Williams). The most popular song identified for each artist in a pilot task was omitted from the sets of titles/clips. Following a distractor task, participants were asked to write down as many of the songs as they could recall. They were also asked to return a week later and complete a second recall task. Participants falsely recalled a significant number of the related but non-presented songs in both experiments and this increased a week later, while correct recall for presented items decreased. The results are discussed in terms of theory for musical memory as well as in the context of providing a novel method for exploring the organisation of musical memory.     

Memory for pitch in congenital amusia: Beyond a fine-grained pitch discrimination problem

Congenital amusia is a disorder that affects the perception and production of music. While amusia has been associated with deficits in pitch discrimination, several reports suggest that memory deficits also play a role. The present study investigated short-term memory span for pitch-based and verbal information in 14 individuals with amusia and matched controls. Analogous adaptive-tracking procedures were used to generate tone and digit spans using stimuli that exceeded psychophysically measured pitch perception thresholds. Individuals with amusia had significantly smaller tone spans, whereas their digits spans were a similar size to those of controls. An automated operation span task was used to determine working memory capacity. Working memory deficits were seen in only a small subgroup of individuals with amusia. These findings support the existence of a pitch-specific component within short-term memory and suggest that congenital amusia is more than a disorder of fine-grained pitch discrimination.     

The song,not the singer: Infants prefer to listen to familiar songs,regardless of singer identity

Parent's infant-directed vocalizations are highly dynamic and emotive compared to their adult-directed counterparts, and correspondingly, more effectively capture infants’ attention. Infant-directed singing is a specific type of vocalization that is common throughout the world. Parents tend to sing a small handful of songs in a stereotyped way, and a number of recent studies have highlighted the significance of familiar songs in young children's social behaviors and evaluations. To date, no studies have examined whether infants’ responses to familiar versus unfamiliar songs are modulated by singer identity (i.e., whether the singer is their own parent). In the present study, we investigated 9- to 12-month-old infants’ (N = 29) behavioral and electrodermal responses to relatively familiar and unfamiliar songs sung by either their own mother or another infant's mother. Familiar songs recruited more attention and rhythmic movement, and lower electrodermal levels relative to unfamiliar songs. Moreover, these responses were robust regardless of whether the singer was their mother or a stranger, even when the stranger's rendition differed greatly from their mothers’ in mean fundamental frequency and tempo. Results indicate that infants’ interest in familiar songs is not limited to idiosyncratic characteristics of their parents’ song renditions, and points to the potential for song as an effective early signifier of group membership.     

Memory for vocal tempo and pitch

Two experiments examined the ability to remember the vocal tempo and pitch of different individuals, and the way this information is encoded into the cognitive system. In both studies, participants engaged in an initial familiarisation phase while attending was systematically directed towards different aspects of speakers’ voices. Afterwards, they received a tempo or pitch recognition task. Experiment 1 showed that tempo and pitch are both incidentally encoded into memory at levels comparable to intentional learning, and no performance deficit occurs with divided attending. Experiment 2 examined the ability to recognise pitch or tempo when the two dimensions co-varied and found that the presence of one influenced the other: performance was best when both dimensions were positively correlated with one another. As a set, these findings indicate that pitch and tempo are automatically processed in a holistic, integral fashion [Garner, W. R. (1974). The processing of information and structure. Potomac, MD: Erlbaum.] which has a number of cognitive implications.     

The interdependence of pitch and temporal judgments by absolute pitch possessors

The auditory tau and the kappa effects show that there is time-pitch interdependence in our perception. Our judgments of pitch separation between two tones depend on the temporal interval between them (the auditory tau effect), and our judgments of the tones’ temporal interval depend on their pitch separation (the kappa effect). The mechanisms underlying this interdependence were investigated by studying the auditory tau and the kappa effect in three experiments. Comparisons were made between results obtained from subjects with absolute pitch and those who did not have absolute pitch, and two frequency ranges of pure tones (octave and whole-tone conditions) were selected. The procedures had been used in previous experiments (Shigeno, 1986), in which the auditory tau and the kappa effects were compared in speech and nonspeech stimuli. The present results demonstrate that the auditory tau effect does not occur when possessors of absolute pitch judge the closeness of stimuli in pitch, except when the stimulus continuum consists of tones that do not correspond to musical notes in the whole-tone condition. The kappa effect was obtained in the judgment of possessors of absolute pitch in both the octave and the whole-tone conditions. These findings suggest that the interaction between temporal interval and pitch judgment might be explained in terms of the two different memory modes for retaining the pitch of tones, and that these effects occur at the precategorical level.     

Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative pitch processors. Infants familiarized with a melody for 7 days preferred, on the eighth day, to listen to a novel melody in comparison to the familiarized one, regardless of whether the melodies at test were presented at the same pitch as during familiarization or transposed up or down by a perfect fifth (7/12th of an octave) or a tritone (1/2 octave). On the other hand, infants showed no preference for a transposed over original-pitch version of the familiarized melody, indicating that either they did not remember the absolute pitch, or it was not as salient to them as the relative pitch.     

Memory processes in the identification of pitch

A study in pitch identification with three interstimulus intervals is reported. Ss received a pretest, three drills, and a posttest. Results include: (a) superior performance on stimuli requiring only a simple discrimination judgment, (b) inferior performance at longer interstimulus intervals, (c) a greater tendency to repeat correct rather than incorrect responses to adjacent tones at the same pitch level, and (d) a modest, but reliable, improvement in pitch identification accuracy from the pre- to the posttest. Relevance of the results for an interpretation of pitch identification as dependent on memory processes is discussed.     

Memory advantage for produced words and familiar native accents

Our memory is better for words that we have read aloud than for words that we have read silently or have listened to. The present study tested this memory advantage for words with native accent markers that participants were either highly familiar or less familiar. As in previous studies, produced words were subsequently remembered better than listened-to words. In contrast to previous studies that involved a comparison of global foreign accents with standard native accents, in the present study words with highly familiar accent markers were remembered better than words with less familiar accent markers (Experiment 1). The familiar accent advantage was also found when participants could not hear their own productions during the training phase (Experiment 2). When tested with a week delay, produced words were still remembered better than listened-to words, but the advantage for words with familiar accent markers was no longer found (Experiment 3).