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).     

Maximum key-profile correlation (MKC) as a measure of tonal structure in music

Tonal structure is musical organization on the basis of pitch, in which pitches vary in importance and rate of occurrence according to their relationship to a tonal center. Experiment 1 evaluated the maximum key-profile correlation (MKC), a product of Krumhansl and Schmuckler’s key-finding algorithm (Krumhansl, 1990), as a measure of tonal structure. The MKC is the maximum correlation coefficient between the pitch class distribution in a musical sample and key profiles,which indicate the stability of pitches with respect to particular tonal centers. The MKC values of melodies correlated strongly with listeners’ ratings of tonal structure. To measure the influence of the temporal order of pitches on perceived tonal structure, three measures (fifth span, semitone span, and pitch contour) taken from previous studies of melody perception were also correlated with tonal structure ratings. None of the temporal measures correlated as strongly or as consistently with tonal structure ratings as did the MKC, and nor did combining them with the MKC improve prediction of tonal structure ratings. In Experiment 2, the MKC did not correlate with recognition memory of melodies. However, melodies with very low MKC values were recognized less accurately than melodies with very high MKC values. Although it does not incorporate temporal, rhythmic, or harmonic factors that may influence perceived tonal structure, the MKC can be interpreted as a measure of tonal structure, at least for brief melodies.     

The integration of stimulus dimensions in the perception of music

A central aim of cognitive psychology is to explain how we integrate stimulus dimensions into a unified percept, but how the dimensions of pitch and time combine in the perception of music remains a largely unresolved issue. The goal of this study was to test the effect of varying the degree of conformity to dimensional structure in pitch and time (specifically, tonality and metre) on goodness ratings and classifications of melodies. The pitches and durations of melodies were either presented in their original order, as a reordered sequence, or replaced with random elements. Musically trained and untrained participants (24 each) rated melodic goodness, attending selectively to the dimensions of pitch, time, or both. Also, 24 trained participants classified whether or not the melodies were tonal, metric, or both. Pitch and temporal manipulations always influenced responses, but participants successfully emphasized either dimension in accordance with instructions. Effects of pitch and time were mostly independent for selective attention conditions, but more interactive when evaluating both dimensions. When interactions occurred, the effect of either dimension increased as the other dimension conformed more to its original structure. Relative main effect sizes (| pitch η(2) - time η(2) |) predicted the strength of pitch-time interactions (pitch?×?time η(2)); interactions were stronger when main effect sizes were more evenly matched. These results have implications for dimensional integration in several domains. Relative main effect size could serve as an indicator of dimensional salience, such that interactions are more likely when dimensions are equally salient.     

绝对音高者对音乐的加工及其神经机制

绝对音高感是一种特殊的音高命名能力。通过论述绝对音高能力与音乐加工的关系,发现绝对音高者具有对音高、音程和旋律的加工优势,但他们对相对音高的加工存在劣势。同时,与非绝对音高者相比,绝对音高者大脑结构和功能都表现出特殊性。未来研究应进一步厘清音乐训练对绝对音高者音乐加工的影响。     

Do metrical accents create illusory phenomenal accents?

In music that is perceived as metrically structured, events coinciding with the main beat are called metrically accented. Are these accents purely cognitive, or do they perhaps represent illusory increases in perceived loudness or duration, caused by heightened attention to main beats? In four separate tasks, musicians tried to detect a small actual increase or decrease in the loudness or duration of a single note in melodies comprising 12 notes. Musical notation prescribed a meter (6/8) implying a main beat coinciding with every third note. Effects of metrical accentuation on detection performance were found in all four tasks. However, they reflected primarily an increase in sensitivity to physical changes in main beat positions, likely to be due to enhanced attention. There was no evidence of biases indicating illusory phenomenal accents in those positions. By contrast, and independent of metrical structure, pitch accents due to pitch contour pivots were often mistaken for increases in loudness.     

A probabilistic model of melody perception

This study presents a probabilistic model of melody perception, which infers the key of a melody and also judges the probability of the melody itself. The model uses Bayesian reasoning: For any "surface" pattern and underlying "structure," we can infer the structure maximizing P (structure|surface) based on knowledge of P (surface, structure). The probability of the surface can then be calculated as ∑ P (surface, structure), summed over all structures. In this case, the surface is a pattern of notes; the structure is a key. A generative model is proposed, based on three principles: (a) melodies tend to remain within a narrow pitch range; (b) note-to-note intervals within a melody tend to be small; and (c) notes tend to conform to a distribution (or key profile) that depends on the key. The model is tested in three ways. First, it is tested on its ability to identify the keys of a set of folksong melodies. Second, it is tested on a melodic expectation task in which it must judge the probability of different notes occurring given a prior context; these judgments are compared with perception data from a melodic expectation experiment. Finally, the model is tested on its ability to detect incorrect notes in melodies by assigning them lower probabilities than the original versions.     

Infants’ perception of musical patterns

This paper examines infants’ ability to perceive various aspects of musical material that are significant in music in general and in Western European music in particular: contour, intervals, exact pitches, diatonic structure, and rhythm. For the most part, infants focus on relational aspects of melodies, synthesizing global representations from local details. They encode the contour of a melody across variations in exact pitches and intervals. They extract information about pitch direction from the smallest musically relevant pitch change in Western music, the semitone. Under certain conditions, infants detect interval changes in the context of transposed sequences, their performance showing enhancement for sequences that conform to Western musical structure. Infants have difficulty retaining exact pitches except for sets of pitches that embody important musical relations. In the temporal domain, they group the elements of auditory sequences on the basis of similarity and they extract the temporal structure of a melody across variations in tempo.     

The integration of stimulus dimensions in the perception of music

A central aim of cognitive psychology is to explain how we integrate stimulus dimensions into a unified percept, but how the dimensions of pitch and time combine in the perception of music remains a largely unresolved issue. The goal of this study was to test the effect of varying the degree of conformity to dimensional structure in pitch and time (specifically, tonality and metre) on goodness ratings and classifications of melodies. The pitches and durations of melodies were either presented in their original order, as a reordered sequence, or replaced with random elements. Musically trained and untrained participants (24 each) rated melodic goodness, attending selectively to the dimensions of pitch, time, or both. Also, 24 trained participants classified whether or not the melodies were tonal, metric, or both. Pitch and temporal manipulations always influenced responses, but participants successfully emphasized either dimension in accordance with instructions. Effects of pitch and time were mostly independent for selective attention conditions, but more interactive when evaluating both dimensions. When interactions occurred, the effect of either dimension increased as the other dimension conformed more to its original structure. Relative main effect sizes (| pitch η² – time η² |) predicted the strength of pitch–time interactions (pitch?×?time η²); interactions were stronger when main effect sizes were more evenly matched. These results have implications for dimensional integration in several domains. Relative main effect size could serve as an indicator of dimensional salience, such that interactions are more likely when dimensions are equally salient.     

Pitches that Wire Together Fire Together: Scale Degree Associations Across Time Predict Melodic Expectations

The ongoing generation of expectations is fundamental to listeners’ experience of music, but research into types of statistical information that listeners extract from musical melodies has tended to emphasize transition probabilities and n-grams, with limited consideration given to other types of statistical learning that may be relevant. Temporal associations between scale degrees represent a different type of information present in musical melodies that can be learned from musical corpora using expectation networks, a computationally simple method based on activation and decay. Expectation networks infer the expectation of encountering one scale degree followed in the near (but not necessarily immediate) future by another given scale degree, with previous work suggesting that scale degree associations learned by expectation networks better predict listener ratings of pitch similarity than transition probabilities. The current work outlines how these learned scale degree associations can be combined to predict melodic continuations and tests the resulting predictions on a dataset of listener responses to a musical cloze task previously used to compare two other models of melodic expectation, a variable-order Markov model (IDyOM) and Temperley's music-theoretically motivated model. Under multinomial logistic regression, all three models explain significant unique variance in human melodic expectations, with coefficient estimates highest for expectation networks. These results suggest that generalized scale degree associations informed by both adjacent and nonadjacent relationships between melodic notes influence listeners’ melodic predictions above and beyond n-gram context, highlighting the need to consider a broader range of statistical learning processes that may underlie listeners’ expectations for upcoming musical events.     

Studying expertise in music reading: Use of a pattern-matching paradigm

Two experiments are described that make use of a pattern-matching paradigm to investigate perceptual processing of music notation. In Experiment 1, it is reported that the speed of comparing two visually presented musical sequences is related to the sight-reading skill of the subjects. The effect of the temporal and pitch structure of the comparison stimuli is also assessed. In Experiment 2, eyemovement recordings were taken as subjects performed the task. These data demonstrated that more experienced musicians are able to perform the comparisons with fewer, and shorter, glances between the patterns. These and other findings suggest that skilled sight-reading is associated with an ability to rapidly perceive notes or groups of notes in the score, and confirm that the pattern-matching paradigm is a useful tool in examining expertise in music reading.     

Infants use meter to categorize rhythms and melodies: implications for musical structure learning

Little is known about whether infants perceive meter, the underlying temporal structure of music. We employed a habituation paradigm to examine whether 7-month-old infants could categorize rhythmic and melodic patterns on the basis of the underlying meter, which was implied from event and accent frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants discriminated duple and triple classes of rhythm on the basis of implied meter. Experiment 2 replicated this result while controlling for rhythmic grouping structure, confirming that infants perceived metrical structure despite occasional ambiguities and conflicting group structure. In Experiment 3, infants categorized melodies on the basis of contingencies between metrical position and pitch. Infants presented with metrical melodies detected reversals of pitch/meter contingencies, while infants presented with non-metrical melodies showed no preference. Results indicate that infants can infer meter from rhythmic patterns, and that they may use this metrical structure to bootstrap their knowledge acquisition in music learning.     

Rhythm and pitch in music cognition

Rhythm and pitch are the 2 primary dimensions of music. They are interesting psychologically because simple, well-defined units combine to form highly complex and varied patterns. This article brings together the major developments in research on how these dimensions are perceived and remembered, beginning with psychophysical results on time and pitch perception. Progressively larger units are considered, moving from basic psychological categories of temporal and frequency ratios, to pulse and scale, to metrical and tonal hierarchies, to the formation of musical rhythms and melodies, and finally to the cognitive representation of large-scale musical form. Interactions between the dimensions are considered, and major theoretical proposals are described. The article identifies various links between musical structure and perceptual and cognitive processes, suggesting psychological influences on how sounds are patterned in music.     

Enculturation to musical pitch structure in young children: evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological methods

Children learn the structure of the music of their culture similarly to how they learn the language to which they are exposed in their daily environment. Furthermore, as with language, children acquire this musical knowledge without formal instruction. Two critical aspects of musical pitch structure in Western tonal music are key membership (understanding which notes belong in a key and which do not) and harmony (understanding which notes combine to form chords and which notes and chords tend to follow others). The early developmental trajectory of the acquisition of this knowledge remains unclear, in part because of the difficulty of testing young children. In two experiments, we investigated 4‐ and 5‐year‐olds' enculturation to Western musical pitch using a novel age‐appropriate and engaging behavioral task (Experiment 1) and electroencephalography (EEG; Experiment 2). In Experiment 1 we found behavioral evidence that 5‐year‐olds were sensitive to key membership but not to harmony, and no evidence that 4‐year‐olds were sensitive to either. However, in Experiment 2 we found neurophysiological evidence that 4‐year‐olds were sensitive to both key membership and harmony. Our results suggest that musical enculturation has a long developmental trajectory, and that children may have some knowledge of key membership and harmony before that knowledge can be expressed through explicit behavioral judgments.     

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。     

Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music

The acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal stabilities in music is investigated in children of elementary school age. Listeners judge how good short tone sequences sound as melodies. The ratings show a pattern of increasing differentiation of the pitches in an octave range. The youngest listeners distinguish between scale and nonscale tones; older listeners distinguish between the tonic triad tones and other scale components. A group of adult listeners show octave equivalence and temporal asymmetries, with a preference for sequences ending on the more stable tones within the hierarchy. Pitch height effects do not interact with the age of the listener. These results are discussed in terms of the primacy of physical variables, novice-expert differences, and general cognitive principles governing the acquisition and development of internal representations of pitch relationships.     

Tonal hierarchies in the music of north India

Cross-culturally, most music is tonal in the sense that one particular tone, called the tonic, provides a focus around which the other tones are organized. The specific organizational structures around the tonic show considerable diversity. Previous studies of the perceptual response to Western tonal music have shown that listeners familiar with this musical tradition have internalized a great deal about its underlying organization. Krumhansl and Shepard (1979) developed a probe tone method for quantifying the perceived hierarchy of stability of tones. When applied to Western tonal contexts, the measured hierarchies were found to be consistent with music-theoretic accounts. In the present study, the probe tone method was used to quantify the perceived hierarchy of tones of North Indian music. Indian music is tonal and has many features in common with Western music. One of the most significant differences is that the primary means of expressing tonality in Indian music is through melody, whereas in Western music it is through harmony (the use of chords). Indian music is based on a standard set of melodic forms (called rags), which are themselves built on a large set of scales (thats). The tones within a rag are thought to be organized in a hierarchy of importance. Probe tone ratings were given by Indian and Western listeners in the context of 10 North Indian rags. These ratings confirmed the predicted hierarchical ordering. Both groups of listeners gave the highest ratings to the tonic and the fifth degree of the scale. These tones are considered by Indian music theorists to be structurally significant, as they are immovable tones around which the scale system is constructed, and they are sounded continuously in the drone. Relatively high ratings were also given to the vadi tone, which is designated for each rag and is given emphasis in the melody. The ratings of both groups of listeners generally reflected the pattern of tone durations in the musical contexts. This result suggests that the distribution of tones in music is a psychologically effective means of conveying the tonal hierarchy to listeners whether they are familiar with the musical tradition. Beyond this, only the Indian listeners were sensitive to the scales (thats) underlying the rags. For Indian listeners, multidimensional scaling of the correlations between the rating profiles recovered the theoretical representation of scales described by theorists of Indian music.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

Music perception and octave generalization in rhesus monkeys

Two rhesus monkeys were tested for octave generalization in 8 experiments by transposing 6- and 7-note musical passages by an octave and requiring same or different judgments. The monkeys showed no octave generalization to random-synthetic melodies, atonal melodies, or individual notes. They did show complete octave generalization to childhood songs (e.g., "Happy Birthday") and tonal melodies (from a tonality algorithm). Octave generalization was equally strong for 2-octave transpositions but not for 0.5- or 1.5-octave transpositions of childhood songs. These results combine to show that tonal melodies form musical gestalts for monkeys, as they do for humans, and retain their identity when transposed with whole octaves so that chroma (key) is preserved. This conclusion implicates similar transduction, storage, processing, and relational memory of musical passages in monkeys and humans and has implications for nature-nurture origins of music perception.     

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.     

Dynamic melody recognition: Distinctiveness and the role of musical expertise

The hypothesis that melodies are recognized at moments when they exhibit a distinctive musical pattern was tested. In a melody recognition experiment, point-of-recognition (POR) data were gathered from 32 listeners (16 musicians and 16 nonmusicians) judging 120 melodies. A series of models of melody recognition were developed, resulting from a stepwise multiple regression of two classes of information relating to melodic familiarity and melodic distinctiveness. Melodic distinctiveness measures were assembled through statistical analyses of over 15,000 Western themes and melodies. A significant model, explaining 85% of the variance, entered measures primarily of timing distinctiveness and pitch distinctiveness, but excluding familiarity, as predictors of POR. Differences between nonmusician and musician models suggest a processing shift from momentary to accumulated information with increased exposure to music. Supplemental materials for this article may be downloaded from http://mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Memory for surface features of unfamiliar melodies: independent effects of changes in pitch and tempo

A melody’s identity is determined by relations between consecutive tones in terms of pitch and duration, whereas surface features (i.e., pitch level or key, tempo, and timbre) are irrelevant. Although surface features of highly familiar recordings are encoded into memory, little is known about listeners’ mental representations of melodies heard once or twice. It is also unknown whether musical pitch is represented additively or interactively with temporal information. In two experiments, listeners heard unfamiliar melodies twice in an initial exposure phase. In a subsequent test phase, they heard the same (old) melodies interspersed with new melodies. Some of the old melodies were shifted in key, tempo, or key and tempo. Listeners’ task was to rate how well they recognized each melody from the exposure phase while ignoring changes in key and tempo. Recognition ratings were higher for old melodies that stayed the same compared to those that were shifted in key or tempo, and detrimental effects of key and tempo changes were additive in between-subjects (Experiment 1) and within-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. The results confirm that surface features are remembered for melodies heard only twice. They also imply that key and tempo are processed and stored independently.