Exposure effects on music preference and recognition

In three experiments, the effects of exposure to melodies on their subsequent liking and recognition were explored. In each experiment, the subjects first listened to a set of familiar and unfamiliar melodies in a study phase. In the subsequent test phase, the melodies were repeated, along with a set of distractors matched in familiarity. Half the subjects were required to rate their liking of each melody, and half had to identify the melodies they had heard earlier in the study phase. Repetition of the studied melodies was found to increase liking of the unfamiliar melodies in the affect task and to be best for detection of familiar melodies in the recognition task (Experiments 1, 2, and 3). These memory effects were found to fade at different time delays between study and test in the affect and recognition tasks, with the latter leading to the most persistent effects (Experiment 2). Both study-to-test changes in melody timbre and manipulation of study tasks had a marked impact on recognition and little influence on liking judgments (Experiment 3). Thus, all manipulated variables were found to dissociate the memory effects in the two tasks. The results are consistent with the view that memory effects in the affect and recognition tasks pertain to the implicit and explicit forms of memory, respectively. Part of the results are, however, at variance with the literature on implicit and explicit memory in the auditory domain. Attribution of these differences to the use of musical material is discussed.     

Specific previous experience affects perception of harmony and meter

Prior knowledge shapes our experiences, but which prior knowledge shapes which experiences? This question is addressed in the domain of music perception. Three experiments were used to determine whether listeners activate specific musical memories during music listening. Each experiment provided listeners with one of two musical contexts that was presented simultaneously with a melody. After a listener was familiarized with melodies embedded in contexts, the listener heard melodies in isolation and judged the fit of a final harmonic or metrical probe event. The probe event matched either the familiar (but absent) context or an unfamiliar context. For both harmonic (Experiments 1 and 3) and metrical (Experiment 2) information, exposure to context shifted listeners' preferences toward a probe matching the context that they had been familiarized with. This suggests that listeners rapidly form specific musical memories without explicit instruction, which are then activated during music listening. These data pose an interesting challenge for models of music perception which implicitly assume that the listener's knowledge base is predominantly schematic or abstract.     

Judging familiarity and emotion from very brief musical excerpts

In the present study, the gating paradigm was used to measure how much perceptual information that was extracted from musical excerpts needs to be heard to provide judgments of familiarity and of emotionality. Nonmusicians heard segments of increasing duration (250, 500, 1,000 msec, etc.). The stimuli were segments from familiar and unfamiliar musical excerpts in Experiment 1 and from very moving and emotionally neutral musical excerpts in Experiment 2. Participants judged how familiar (Experiment 1) or how moving (Experiment 2) the excerpt was to them. Results show that a feeling of familiarity can be triggered by 500-msec segments, and that the distinction between moving and neutral can be made for 250-msec segments. This finding extends the observation of fast-acting cognitive and emotional processes from face and voice perception to music perception.     

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.     

A developmental study of latent absolute pitch memory

The ability to recall the absolute pitch level of familiar music (latent absolute pitch memory) is widespread in adults, in contrast to the rare ability to label single pitches without a reference tone (overt absolute pitch memory). The present research investigated the developmental profile of latent absolute pitch (AP) memory and explored individual differences related to this ability. In two experiments, 288 children from 4 to12 years of age performed significantly above chance at recognizing the absolute pitch level of familiar melodies. No age-related improvement or decline, nor effects of musical training, gender, or familiarity with the stimuli were found in regard to latent AP task performance. These findings suggest that latent AP memory is a stable ability that is developed from as early as age 4 and persists into adulthood.     

Time course of melody recognition: a gating paradigm study

Recognizing a well-known melody (e.g., one's national anthem) is not an all-or-none process. Instead, recognition develops progressively while the melody unfolds over time. To examine which factors govern the time course of this recognition process, the gating paradigm, initially designed to study auditory word recognition, was adapted to music. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with segments of increasing duration of familiar and unfamiliar melodies (i.e., the first note, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so forth). Recognition was assessed after each segment either by requiring participants to provide a familiarity judgment (Experiment 1) or by asking them to sing the melody that they thought had been presented (Experiment 2). In general, the more familiar the melody, the fewer the notes required for recognition. Musicians judged music's familiarity within fewer notes than did nonmusicians, whereas the reverse situation (i.e., musicians were slower than nonmusicians) occurred when a sung response was requested. However, both musicians and nonmusicians appeared to segment melodies into the same perceptual units (i.e., motives) in order to access the correct representation in memory. These results are interpreted in light of the cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1987), as applied to the music domain.     

The perception of interleaved melodies

If the notes of two melodies whose pitch ranges do not overlap are interleaved in time so that successive tones come from the different melodies, the resulting sequence of tones is perceptually divided into groups that correspond to the two melodies. Such “melodic fission” demonstrates perceptual grouping based on pitch alone, and has been used extensively in music.Experiment I showed that the identification of interleaved pairs of familiar melodies is possible if their pitch ranges do not overlap, but difficult otherwise. A short-term recognition-memory paradigm (Expt II) showed that interleaving a “background” melody with an unfamiliar melody interferes with same-different judgments regardless of the separation of their pitch ranges, but that range separation attenuates the interference effect. When pitch ranges overlap, listeners can overcome the interference effect and recognize a familiar target melody if the target is prespecified, thereby permitting them to search actively for it (Expt III). But familiarity or prespecification of the interleaved background melody appears not to reduce its interfering effects on same-different judgments concerning unfamiliar target melodies (Expt IV).     

Variability and recognition memory: Are there analogous indexical effects in music and speech?

Indexical effects refer to the influence of surface variability of the to-be-remembered items, such as different voices speaking the same words or different timbres (musical instruments) playing the same melodies, on recognition memory performance. The nature of timbre effects in melody recognition was investigated in two experiments. Experiment 1 showed that melodies that remained in the same timbre from study to test were discriminated better than melodies presented in a previously studied but different, or unstudied timbre at test. Timbre effects are attributed solely to instance-specific matching, rather than timbre-specific familiarity. In Experiment 2, when a previously unstudied timbre was similar to the original timbre and it played the melodies at test, performance was comparable to the condition when the exact same timbre was repeated at test. The use of a similar timbre at test enabled the listener to discriminate old from new melodies reliably. Overall, our data suggest that timbre-specific information is encoded and stored in long-term memory. Analogous indexical effects arising from timbre (nonmusical) and voice (nonlexical) attributes in music and speech processing respectively are implied and discussed.     

Name or hum that tune: Feeling of knowing for music

This is the first reported research that explores the feeling of knowing (FOK) for musical stimuli. Subjects attempted to recall melodies and titles of musical pieces, made FOK ratings when recall failed, and then had a recognition test. With instrumental music (Experiment 1), more titles were recalled when melodies were given as cues than vice versa. With songs whose lyrics were not presented (Experiment 2), however, more melodies were recalled than were titles. For nonrecalled items, although the overall levels of recognition did not differ, FOK ratings were higher for titles than for melodies in Experiment 1, and the opposite pattern occurred in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the FOK ratings predicted melody recognition more accurately than they did title recognition.     

Letter detection in very familiar texts

In the present study, we investigated whether patterns of letter detection for function and content words in texts are affected by the familiarity of the material being read. In Experiment 1, subjects searched for target letters in sentences that had been rehearsed prior to performing the letter detection on them as well as on unfamiliar sentences. In Experiment 2, subjects searched for target letters in highly familiar verses (e.g., nursery rhymes) and in unfamiliar sentences that were matched to the familiar verses. A disadvantage in letter detection for function as compared with content words consistently found with unfamiliar passages was reduced significantly with the familiar material in both experiments. Specifically, letter detection for content words grew worse in familiar text, but letter detection for function words showed a contrasting modest, though nonsignificant, improvement. The results are consistent with the proposition that in very familiar texts, parafoveal analysis permits the identification of generally less familiar content words. Simultaneously, the normal pattern of weighing the structure and content elements of text changes so that more fixations on function words occur than when one is reading unfamiliar texts.     

Face processing and familiarity: Evidence from eye‐movement data

How is information extracted from familiar and unfamiliar faces? Three experiments, in which eye‐movement measures were used, examined whether there was differential sampling of the internal face region according to familiarity. Experiment 1 used a face familiarity task and found that whilst the majority of fixations fell within the internal region, there were no differences in the sampling of this region according to familiarity. Experiment 2 replicated these findings, using a standard recognition memory paradigm. The third experiment employed a matching task, and once again found that the majority of fixations fell within the internal region. Additionally, this experiment found that there was more sampling of the internal region when faces were familiar compared with when they were unfamiliar. The use of eye fixation measures affirms the importance of internal facial features in the recognition of familiar faces compared with unfamiliar faces, but only when viewers compare pairs of faces.     

Feeling-of-knowing for songs and instrumental music

We explored the differences between metamemory judgments for titles as well as for melodies of instrumental music and those for songs with lyrics. Participants were given melody or title cues and asked to provide the corresponding titles or melodies or feeling of knowing (FOK) ratings. FOK ratings were higher but less accurate for titles with melody cues than vice versa, but only in instrumental music, replicating previous findings. In a series of seven experiments, we ruled out style, instrumentation, and strategy differences as explanations for this asymmetry. A mediating role of lyrics between the title and the melody in songs was also ruled out. What emerged as the main explanation was the degree of familiarity with the musical pieces, which was manipulated either episodically or semantically, and within this context, lyrics appeared to serve as an additional source of familiarity. Results are discussed using the Interactive Theory of how FOK judgments are made.     

绝对音高感对音乐句法加工能力的影响

绝对音高感是一种敏锐的音高知觉能力。拥有这种能力的人可以在没有标准音(A4)参照下, 对所听到的音高进行命名。本文通过对比绝对音高感被试与不具有绝对音高感被试对音乐句法基本规则的知觉以及对音乐句法结构划分能力的差异, 探讨绝对音高感与音乐句法加工能力之间的关系。结果表明, 绝对音高感被试对音乐句法基本规则的知觉水平高于控制组; 同时, 这种知觉上的优势也延伸到他们对音乐句法结构的划分。这一结果说明, 绝对音高感被试不仅可以对音高进行孤立命名, 而且表现出对调性音乐音高关系加工的优势。     

Some influences of accent structure on melody recognition

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the roles of joint accent structure and familiarity in delayed recognition of relatively long tonal melodies. Melodic themes of target melodies were defined by correlating contour-related pitch accents with temporal accents (accent coupling) during an initial familiarization phase. Later, subjects gave recognition responses to key-transposed versions of the target melodies as well as to decoys with same and different contour accent patterns. In Experiment 1, all to-be-recognized melodies occurred both in an original rhythm, which preserved accent coupling, and in a new rhythm, which did not. Listeners were best at distinguishing targets from different decoys, especially in the original rhythm. In Experiment 2, the familiarity of target tunes and the rhythmic similarity in recognition were varied. Similar rhythms preserved accent coupling, whereas dissimilar rhythms did not. Listeners were most adept in distinguishing familiar targets from different decoys (Experiment 2A), particularly when they appeared in novel but similar rhythms. However, in similar rhythm conditions, listeners also frequently mistook same decoys for targets. With less familiar targets (Experiment 2B), these effects were attenuated, and performance showed general effects of pitch contour.     

Verbal and behavioral responses to familiar and unfamiliar music

Thirty adult subjects completed an Operant Music Listening Recorder (OMLR) task with two unfamiliar and two familiar music channels (one “popular” and one “classical” in each case), then rated the music on each channel on seven-point scales for liking, quality, and familiarity. The two familiar music channels received significantly higher ratings than the two unfamiliar channels on all three rating scales, and there were no significant main effects or interactions involving musical style. The predictions (a) that subjects would spend more time listening to the familiar channels on the OMLR task, and (b) that measures of listening time would display higher correlations with ratings of liking than with those of quality both received weak support from the direction of the results, but neither was confirmed by statistical significance tests. The results are discussed in terms of the fragmentation between the affective and evaluative components of attitudes toward music.     

Harmonic expectation and affect in Western music: effects of attention and training

We investigated the effects of selective attention and musical training on the processing ofharmonic expectations. In Experiment 1, participants with and without musical training were required to respond to the contour of melodies as they were presented with chord progressions that were highly expected, slightly unexpected, or extremely unexpected. Reaction time and accuracy results showed that when attention was focused on the melody, musically trained participants were still sensitive to different harmonic expectations, whereas participants with no musical training were undifferentiated across expectation conditions. In Experiment 2, participants were required to listen holistically to the entire chord progression and to rate their preference for each chord progression. Results from preference ratings showed that all the participants, with or without musical training, were sensitive to manipulations of harmonic expectations. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that changing the speed of presentation of chord progressions did not affect the pattern of results. The four experiments together highlight the importance of attentional focus in musical training, especially as it relates to the processing of harmonic expectations.     

Play it again: did this melody occur more frequently or was it heard more recently? The role of stimulus familiarity in episodic recognition of music

Episodic recognition of novel and familiar melodies was examined by asking participants to make judgments about the recency and frequency of presentation of melodies over the course of two days of testing. For novel melodies, recency judgments were poor and participants often confused the number of presentations of a melody with its day of presentation; melodies heard frequently were judged as have been heard more recently than they actually were. For familiar melodies, recency judgments were much more accurate and the number of presentations of a melody helped rather than hindered performance. Frequency judgments were generally more accurate than recency judgments and did not demonstrate the same interaction with musical familiarity. Overall, these findings suggest that (1) episodic recognition of novel melodies is based more on a generalized "feeling of familiarity" than on a specific episodic memory, (2) frequency information contributes more strongly to this generalized memory than recency information, and (3) the formation of an episodic memory for a melody depends either on the overall familiarity of the stimulus or the availability of a verbal label.     

Memory for details about people: familiarity,relatedness, and gender congruency

This study examines factors that influence memory for details about people. In two experiments, subjects learned fictitious details about familiar (friends, relatives) and/or unfamiliar individuals, and were tested both immediately and after a 1-week delay. To control for a confounding between familiarity and genetic relatedness in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 specific relationships (identical twin, first cousin, acquaintance) were assigned to unfamiliar individuals. Across experiments, retention was enhanced for familiar compared to unfamiliar individuals, for friends/acquaintances compared to relatives, for more closely than distantly related individuals, and for individuals of the opposite gender as the subject.     

Recognizing melodies: A dynamic interpretation

Two experiments explore hypotheses about rhythm and contour in recognition of simple pitch strings (melodies). Target melodies that differed with respect to pitch relationships (interval and contour pitch differences) and rhythm, were presented to ordinary listeners who were told to learn the melodies (Phase I). In a subsequent recognition test (Phase II), listeners had to recognize these same target melodies although they were transposed to a different musical key. In recognition, target melodies appeared in the original rhythm or in new rhythms that simulated some pause properties of the original rhythm. Target melodies were interspersed with decoy melodies that either preserved the pitch contour of targets or did not; all appeared in the original rhythm and in new rhythms. Results indicated that a new rhythmic context lowered recognizability of target melodies, and that decoys were most confusing when they possessed the same “dynamic shape” (contour-plus-rhythm) as targets (Experiment 1). Also, target recognition improved with Phase I familiarity (Experiment 2), although rhythmic shifts remained detrimental across levels of target familiarity. Confusions based on “dynamic shape” accounted for a relatively high proportion of errors where familiarity with targets is low. Findings were interpreted in terms of a theory of context-sensitive dynamic attending in which remembering is assumed to involve recapitulation of the original rhythmical activities involved in attending to melodies.     

Memory for Music in Alzheimer’s Disease: Unforgettable?

The notion that memory for music can be preserved in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) has been raised by a number of case studies. In this paper, we review the current research examining musical memory in patients with AD. In keeping with models of memory described in the non-musical domain, we propose that various forms of musical memory exist, and may be differentially impaired in AD, reflecting the pattern of neuropathological changes associated with the condition. Our synthesis of this literature reveals a dissociation between explicit and implicit musical memory functions. Implicit, specifically procedural musical memory, or the ability to play a musical instrument, can be spared in musicians with AD. In contrast, explicit musical memory, or the recognition of familiar or unfamiliar melodies, is typically impaired. Thus, the notion that music is unforgettable in AD is not wholly supported. Rather, it appears that the ability to play a musical instrument may be unforgettable in some musicians with AD.