Music tonality and context-dependent recall: The influence of key change and mood mediation

Music in a minor key is often claimed to sound sad, whereas music in a major key is typically viewed as sounding cheerful. Such claims suggest that maintaining or switching the tonality of a musical selection between information encoding and retrieval should promote robust “mood-mediated” context-dependent memory (CDM) effects. The reported experiment examined this hypothesis using versions of a Chopin waltz where the key was either reinstated or switched at retrieval, so producing minor–minor, major–major, minor–major, and major–minor conditions. Better word recall arose in reinstated-key conditions (particularly for the minor–minor group) than in switched-key conditions, supporting the existence of tonality-based CDM effects. The tonalities also induced different mood states. The minor key induced a more negative mood than the major key, and participants in switched-key conditions demonstrated switched moods between learning and recall. Despite the association between music tonality and mood, a path analysis failed to reveal a reliable mood-mediation effect. We discuss why mood-mediated CDM may have failed to emerge in this study, whilst also acknowledging that an alternative “mental-context” account can explain our results (i.e., the mental representation of music tonality may act as a contextual cue that elicits information retrieval).     

The representation of pitch in auditory imagery: Evidence from S-R compatibility and distance effects

In three experiments we explored the nature of representations constructed during the perception and imagination of pitch. We employed a same–different task to eliminate the influence of nonauditory information and to minimise use of cognitive strategies on auditory imagery. A reference tone of frequency 1000, 1500, or 2000 Hz, or an imagined tone of a pitch indicated by a visual cue, was followed by a comparison tone (1000, 1500, or 2000 Hz) to which either a speeded same or different response was required. In separate experiments, same–different judgements were mapped to vertically (Experiments 1 and 2) and horizontally arranged responses (Experiment 3). Judgements of tones closer in pitch yielded longer reaction times and higher error rates than more distant tones, indicating a pitch distance effect for perceptual and imagery tasks alike. In addition, in the imagery task, same–different responses were faster when low-pitched tones demanded a bottom or left key response and high-pitched tones a top or right response than vice versa, suggesting that pitch is coded spatially. Together, these behavioural effects support the assumption that both perceived and imagined pitch are translated into an analogical representation in the spatial domain.     

“Enacted” auditory images are ambiguous; “pure” auditory images are not

Previous research indicates that visual images are inherently unambiguous. The present study extends this argument to auditory imagery. In Experiment 1, subjects were able to reinterpret an imaged ambiguous auditory figure, but covert subvocalization apparently aided this reinterpretation. When subvocalization was blocked, reinterpretations were eliminated. Experiments 2 and 3 generalize this finding to different procedures and stimuli. Experiment 4 explores further the role of subvocalization, by showing that the likelihood of reinterpreting an imaged stimulus is directly proportional to the degree of enactment allowed. We argue that subvocalization or enactment provides an internal stimulus that is subject to reinterpretation. Without enactment, the “pure” auditory image is as unambiguous as a visual image. Thus, in both visual and auditory modalities, images come into being as representations and so are inherently meaningful.     

Reading voices and hearing text: talker-specific auditory imagery in reading

A series of experiments was conducted to determine if linguistic representations accessed during reading include auditory imagery for characteristics of a talker's voice. In 3 experiments, participants were familiarized with two talkers during a brief prerecorded conversation. One talker spoke at a fast speaking rate, and one spoke at a slow speaking rate. Each talker was identified by name. At test, participants were asked to either read aloud (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) a passage that they were told was written by either the fast or the slow talker. Reading times, both silent and aloud, were significantly slower when participants thought they were reading a passage written by the slow talker than when reading a passage written by the fast talker. Reading times differed as a function of passage author more for difficult than for easy texts, and individual differences in general auditory imagery ability were related to reading times. These results suggest that readers engage in a type of auditory imagery while reading that preserves the perceptual details of an author's voice.     

Perceptual tests of an algorithm for musical key-finding

Perceiving the tonality of a musical passage is a fundamental aspect of the experience of hearing music. Models for determining tonality have thus occupied a central place in music cognition research. Three experiments investigated 1 well-known model of tonal determination: the Krumhansl-Schmuckler key-finding algorithm. In Experiment 1, listeners' percepts of tonality following short musical fragments derived from preludes by Bach and Chopin were compared with predictions of tonality produced by the algorithm; these predictions were very accurate for the Bach preludes but considerably less so for the Chopin preludes. Experiment 2 explored a subset of the Chopin preludes, finding that the algorithm could predict tonal percepts on a measure-by-measure basis. In Experiment 3, the algorithm predicted listeners' percepts of tonal movement throughout a complete Chopin prelude. These studies support the viability of the Krumhansl-Schmuckler key-finding algorithm as well as a model of listeners' tonal perceptions of musical passages.     

Tonal strength and melody recognition after long and short delays

In a continuous-running-memory task, subjects heard novel seven-note melodies that were tested after delays of 11 sec (empty) or 39 sec (filled). Test items were transposed to new pitch levels (to moderately distant keys in the musical sense)and included exact transpositions (targets), same-contour lures with altered pitch intervals, and new-contour lures. Melodies differed in tonal strength (degree of conformity to a musical key) and were tonally strong, tonally weak, or atonal. False alarms to same-contour lures decreased over the longer delay period, but only for tonal stimuli. In agreement with previous studies, discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals improved with increased delay, whereas discrimination of more global contour information declined, again only for tonal stimuli. These results suggest that poor short-delay performance in rejecting same-contour lures arises from confusion that is based on the similarity of tonality between standard stimuli and lures. If a test item has the same contour and a similar tonality to a just-presented item, subjects tend to accept it. After a delay filled with melodies in other tonalities, the salience of key information recedes, and subjects base their judgments on more detailed pattern information (namely, exact pitch intervals). The fact that tonality affects judgments of melodic contour indicates that contour is not an entirely separable feature of melodies but rather that a melody with its contour constitutes an integrated perceptual whole.     

The effect of task and pitch structure on pitch-time interactions in music

Musical pitch-time relations were explored by investigating the effect of temporal variation on pitch perception. In Experiment 1, trained musicians heard a standard tone followed by a tonal context and then a comparison tone. They then performed one of two tasks. In the cognitive task, they indicated whether the comparison tone was in the key of the context. In the perceptual task, they judged whether the comparison tone was higher or lower than the standard tone. For both tasks, the comparison tone occurred early, on time, or late with respect to temporal expectancies established by the context. Temporal variation did not affect accuracy in either task. Experiment 2 used the perceptual task and varied the pitch structure by employing either a tonal or an atonal context. Temporal variation did not affect accuracy for tonal contexts, but did for atonal contexts. Experiment 3 replicated these results and controlled potential confounds. We argue that tonal contexts bias attention toward pitch and eliminate effects of temporal variation, whereas atonal contexts do not, thus fostering pitch-time interactions. Psychonomic Society, Inc.     

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)     

Tonal strength and melody recognition after long and short delays.

In a continuous-running-memory task, subjects heard novel seven-note melodies that were tested after delays of 11 sec (empty) or 39 sec (filled). Test items were transposed to new pitch levels (to moderately distant keys in the musical sense) and included exact transpositions (targets), same-contour lures with altered pitch intervals, and new-contour lures. Melodies differed in tonal strength (degree of conformity to a musical key) and were tonally strong, tonally weak, or atonal. False alarms to same-contour lures decreased over the longer delay period, but only for tonal stimuli. In agreement with previous studies, discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals improved with increased delay, whereas discrimination of more global contour information declined, again only for tonal stimuli. These results suggest that poor short-delay performance in rejecting same-contour lures arises from confusion that is based on the similarity of tonality between standard stimuli and lures. If a test item has the same contour and a similar tonality to a just-presented item, subjects tend to accept it. After a delay filled with melodies in other tonalities, the salience of key information recedes, and subjects base their judgments on more detailed pattern information (namely, exact pitch intervals). The fact that tonality affects judgments of melodic contour indicates that contour is not an entirely separable feature of melodies but rather that a melody with its contour constitutes an integrated perceptual whole.     

From auditory image to auditory percept: Facilitation through common processes?

Two experiments explored implicit memory for auditory stimuli as measured by a test of perceptual identification. The facilitative effect of perceived auditory primes was contrasted with that of imaged auditory primes. In Experiment 1, there was a significant priming effect from imaged spoken-word primes that did not differ significantly from the level of priming due to perceived spoken-word primes, measured by a test of auditory perceptual identification. There was no facilitation of spoken-word identification following creation of an image of a word’s referent sound. In Experiment 2, identification of an environmental sound was facilitated by prior processing of an imaged sound from the same category, though there was significantly more transfer following processing of the actual sound.     

Perceiving the end: effects of tonal relationships on melodic completion

Two experiments examined listeners' sensitivity to the structural markers of melodic completion. In Experiment 1, both musicians and nonmusicians were asked to rate the ending of folk melodies for their degree of "completeness" and "tonal appropriateness." Results showed that melodies ending with the conventional leading tone-to-tonic progression were rated the most complete and tonally appropriate to the underlying key, more so than melodies ending with the submediant-to-tonic or the tonic-to-dominant progressions. Conversely, melodies ending on the leading tone seemed the most incomplete and tonally inappropriate. In Experiment 2, the perceptual salience of certain pitch functions was enhanced significantly by the pattern of rhythmic accentuation within a melody's context and the presence of the rare tritone interval. The results illustrate an interactive influence of pitch and temporal variables on musical perception and thereby highlight the need to incorporate dynamic pattern factors into internal representations of tonality.     

Absolute pitch in infancy and adulthood: the role of tonal structure

Despite many similarities in infant and adult auditory processing, the literature suggests that two aspects of music perception, pitch processing and knowledge of tonal structure, change over development. The current experiments assess the use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone sequence statistical learning task containing tonal structure. The results suggest that infants preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, supporting the hypothesis that absolute pitch is present in infancy, whereas adults tracked both absolute and relative pitch patterns. Infants and adults detected the tonal structure in the input, suggesting that humans are attuned to basic aspects of tonality early in life.     

Ideomotor effects of pitch on continuation tapping

The ideomotor principle predicts that perception will modulate action where overlap exists between perceptual and motor representations of action. This effect is demonstrated with auditory stimuli. Previous perceptual evidence suggests that pitch contour and pitch distance in tone sequences may elicit tonal motion effects consistent with listeners' implicit awareness of the lawful dynamics of locomotive bodies. To examine modulating effects of perception on action, participants in a continuation tapping task produced a steady tempo. Auditory tones were triggered by each tap. Pitch contour randomly and persistently varied within trials. Pitch distance between successive tones varied between trials. Although participants were instructed to ignore them, tones systematically affected finger dynamics and timing. Where pitch contour implied positive acceleration, the following tap and the intertap interval (ITI) that it completed were faster. Where pitch contour implied negative acceleration, the following tap and the ITI that it completed were slower. Tempo was faster with greater pitch distance. Musical training did not predict the magnitude of these effects. There were no generalized effects on timing variability. Pitch contour findings demonstrate how tonal motion may elicit the spontaneous production of accents found in expressive music performance.     

Multi-Encoding for Pitch Information of Tone Sequences

This study was designed to investigate the possibilities that subjects would visualize an auditory contour as a visual contour (visual imagery) to encode pitch information of tone sequences (Experiment 1), and that subjects would be motivated to attempt to engage in covert rehearsal with multi-code (Experiment 2). The findings from these experiments suggest that: (a) Whereas the highly musically trained subjects were able to encode pitches as accurate notes on a staff, the less well musically trained subjects encoded the pitch sequence as a contour. It is quite evident that there is an intermodal analogy between the perception of pitch relationships and that of relationships in visual space. (b) Pitch rehearsal of auditory information along with note names (dual-code) and staff notation accompanied by pitch rehearsal with note names (triple-code) were the most effective strategies for highly trained subjects with pitches of tonal sequences; melodic contour accompanied by pitch rehearsal (dual-code) was used by highly trained subjects with atonal sequences and by less well trained subjects with both types of sequences.     

Crossmodal facilitation of masked visual target identification

In the present study, participants identified the location of a visual target presented in a rapidly masked, changing sequence of visual distractors. In Experiment 1, we examined performance when a high tone, embedded in a sequence of low tones, was presented in synchrony with the visual target and observed that the high tone improved visual target identification, relative to a condition in which a low tone was synchronized with the visual target, thus replicating Vroomen and de Gelder's (2000, Experiment 1) findings. In subsequent experiments, we presented a single visual, auditory, vibrotactile, or combined audiotactile cue with the visual target and found similar improvements in participants' performance regardless of cue type. These results suggest that crossmodal perceptual organization may account for only a part of the improvement in participants' visual target identification performance reported in Vroomen and de Gelder's original study. Moreover, in contrast with many previous crossmodal cuing studies, our results also suggest that visual cues can enhance visual target identification performance. Alternative accounts for these results are discussed in terms of enhanced saliency, the presence of a temporal marker, and attentional capture by oddball stimuli as potential explanations for the observed performance benefits.     

Verbal transformation: habituation or spreading activation?

Experiment 1 tested the habituation hypothesis of the Verbal Transformation Effect, an auditory illusion in which a repeating verbal stimulus undergoes perceptual transformation, by varying stimulus dimensions which might be expected to retard habituation. Transformations were found to increase as a function of imagery value and word length, failing to support the habituation hypothesis. Experiment 2, in which transformations were found to vary as a function of number of activated semantic representations of a physically invariant homophone stimulus, provided support for a new dual-process explanation of the Transformation effect, based on spreading activation between cognitive representations.     

Sound enhances visual perception: cross-modal effects of auditory organization on vision

Six experiments demonstrated cross-modal influences from the auditory modality on the visual modality at an early level of perceptual organization. Participants had to detect a visual target in a rapidly changing sequence of visual distractors. A high tone embedded in a sequence of low tones improved detection of a synchronously presented visual target (Experiment 1), but the effect disappeared when the high tone was presented before the target (Experiment 2). Rhythmically based or order-based anticipation was unlikely to account for the effect because the improvement was unaffected by whether there was jitter (Experiment 3) or a random number of distractors between successive targets (Experiment 4). The facilitatory effect was greatly reduced when the tone was less abrupt and part of a melody (Experiments 5 and 6). These results show that perceptual organization in the auditory modality can have an effect on perceptibility in the visual modality.     

Sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range

Striking changes in sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range are reported. Participants were presented a key-defining context (do-mi-do-sol) followed by one of the 12 chromatic tones of the octave, and rated the goodness of fit of the probe tone to the context. The set of ratings, called the probe-tone profile, was compared to an established standardised profile for the Western tonal hierarchy. The presentation of context and probe tones at low and high pitch registers resulted in significantly reduced sensitivity to tonality. Sensitivity was especially poor for presentations in the lowest octaves where inharmonicity levels were substantially above the threshold for detection. We propose that sensitivity to tonality may be influenced by pitch salience (or a co-varying factor such as exposure to pitch distributional information) as well as suprathreshold inharmonicity.     

Measuring and modeling real-time responses to music: the dynamics of tonality induction

We examined a variety of real-time responses evoked by a single piece of music, the organ Duetto BWV 805 by J S Bach. The primary data came from a concurrent probe-tone method in which the probe tone is sounded continuously with the music. Listeners judged how well the probe tone fit with the music at each point in time. The process was repeated for all probe tones of the chromatic scale. A self-organizing map (SOM) [Kohonen 1997 Self-organizing Maps (Berlin: Springer)] was used to represent the developing and changing sense of key reflected in these judgments. The SOM was trained on the probe-tone profiles for 24 major and minor keys (Krumhansl and Kessler 1982 Psychological Review 89 334-368). Projecting the concurrent probe-tone data onto the map showed changes both in the perceived keys and in their strengths. Two dynamic models of tonality induction were tested. Model 1 is based on pitch class distributions. Model 2 is based on the tone-transition distributions; it tested the idea that the order of tones might provide additional information about tonality. Both models contained dynamic components for characterizing pitch strength and creating pitch memory representations. Both models produced results closely matching those of the concurrent probe-tone data. Finally real-time judgments of tension were measured. Tension correlated with distance away from the predominant key in the direction of keys built on the dominant and supertonic tones, and also correlated with dissonance.