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.     

Recognition of notated melodies by possessors and nonpossessors of absolute pitch

Musically trained listeners compared a notated melody presented visually and a comparison melody presented auditorily, and judged whether they were exactly the same or not, with respect to relative pitch. Listeners who had absolute pitch showed the poorest performance for melodies transposed to different pitch levels from the notated melodies, whereas they exhibited the highest performance for untransposed melodies. By comparison, the performance of melody recognition by listeners who did not have absolute pitch was not influenced by the actual pitch level at which melodies were played. These results suggest that absolute-pitch listeners tend to rely on absolute pitch even in recognizing transposed melodies, for which the absolute-pitch strategy is not useful.     

Long-term memory for music: infants remember tempo and timbre

We show that infants' long-term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo- and timbre-specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants preferred to listen to a novel folk song, indicating that they remembered the familiarized melody. However, if the tempo (25% faster or slower) or instrument timbre (harp vs. piano) of the familiarized melody was changed at test, infants showed no preference, indicating that they remembered the specific tempo and timbre of the melodies. The results are consistent with an exemplar-based model of memory in infancy rather than one in which structural features are extracted and performance features forgotten.     

Recognition of notated melodies by possessors and nonpossessors of absolute pitch

Musically trained listeners compared a notated melody presented visually and a comparison melody presented auditorily, and judged whether they were exactly the same or not, with respect to relative pitch. Listeners who had absolute pitch showed the poorest performance for melodies transposed to different pitch levels from the notated melodies, whereas they exhibited the highest performance for untransposed melodies. By comparison, the performance of melody recognition by listeners who did not have absolute pitch was not influenced by the actual pitch level at which melodies were played. These results suggest that absolute-pitch listeners tend to rely on absolute pitch even in recognizing transposed melodies, for which the absolute-pitch strategy is not useful.     

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).     

Repetition priming in music

The authors explore priming effects of pitch repetition in music in 3 experiments. Musically untrained participants heard a short melody and sang the last pitch of the melody as quickly as possible. Each experiment manipulated (a) whether or not the tone to be sung (target) was heard earlier in the melody (primed) and (b) the prime-target distance (measured in events). Experiment 1 used variable-length melodies, whereas Experiments 2 and 3 used fixed-length melodies. Experiment 3 changed the timbre of the target tone. In all experiments, fast-responding participants produced repeated tones faster than nonrepeated tones, and this repetition benefit decreased as prime-target distances increased. All participants produced expected tonic endings faster than less expected nontonic endings. Repetition and tonal priming effects are compared with harmonic priming effects in music and with repetition priming effects in language.     

Expectancy in melody: tests of children and adults

Melodic expectancies among children and adults were examined. In Experiment 1, adults, 11-year-olds, and 8-year-olds rated how well individual test tones continued fragments of melodies. In Experiment 2, 11-, 8-, and 5-year-olds sang continuations to 2-tone stimuli. Response patterns were analyzed using 2 models of melodic expectancy. Despite having fewer predictor variables, the 2-factor model (E. G. Schellenberg, 1997) equaled or surpassed the implication-realization model (E. Narmour, 1990) in predictive accuracy. Listeners of all ages expected the next tone in a melody to be proximate in pitch to the tone heard most recently. Older listeners also expected reversals of pitch direction, specifically for tones that changed direction after a disruption of proximity and for tones that formed symmetric patterns.     

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.     

Integration of melody and text in memory for songs

Two experiments examined whether the memory representation for songs consists of independent or integrated components (melody and text). Subjects heard a serial presentation of excerpts from largely unfamiliar folksongs, followed by a recognition test. The test required subjects to recognize songs, melodies, or texts and consisted of five types of items: (a) exact songs heard in the presentation; (b) new songs; (c) old tunes with new words; (d) new tunes with old words; and (e) old tunes with old words of a different song from the same presentation (‘mismatch songs’). Experiment 1 supported the integration hypothesis: Subjects' recognition of components was higher in exact songs (a) than in songs with familiar but mismatched components (e). Melody recognition, in particular, was near chance unless the original words were present. Experiment 2 showed that this integration of melody and text occurred also across different performance renditions of a song and that it could not be eliminated by voluntary attention to the melody.     

Articulation effects in melody recognition memory

Various surface features—timbre, tempo, and pitch—influence melody recognition memory, but articulation format effects, if any, remain unknown. For the first time, these effects were examined. In Experiment 1, melodies that remained in the same, or appeared in a different but similar, articulation format from study to test were recognized better than were melodies that were presented in a distinct format at test. A similar articulation format adequately induced matching processes to enhance recognition. Experiment 2 revealed that melodies rated as perceptually dissimilar on the basis of the location of the articulation mismatch did not impair recognition performance, suggesting an important boundary condition for articulation format effects on memory recognition—the matching of the memory trace and recognition probe may depend more on the overall proportion, rather than the temporal location, of the mismatch. The present findings are discussed in terms of a global matching advantage hypothesis.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Schema-based processing in auditory scene analysis

What is the involvement of what we know in what we perceive? In this article, the contribution of melodic schema-based processes to the perceptual organization of tone sequences is examined. Two unfamiliar six-tone melodies, one of which was interleaved with distractor tones, were presented successively to listeners who were required to decide whether the melodies were identical or different. In one condition, the comparison melody was presented after the mixed sequence: a target melody interleaved with distractor tones. In another condition, it was presented beforehand, so that the listeners had precise knowledge about the melody to be extracted from the mixture. In the latter condition, recognition performance was better and a bias toward same responses was reduced, as compared with the former condition. A third condition, in which the comparison melody presented beforehand was transposed up in frequency, revealed that whereas the performance improvement was explained in part by absolute pitch or frequency priming, relative pitch representation (interval and/or contour structure) may also have played a role. Differences in performance as a function of mean frequency separation between target and distractor sequences, when listeners did or did not have prior knowledge about the target melody, argue for a functional distinction between primitive and schema-based processes in auditory scene analysis.     

Independent temporal and pitch structures in determination of musical phrases

In two experiments we addressed the roles of temporal and pitch structures in judgments of melodic phrases. Musical excerpts were rated on how good or complete a phrase they made. In Experiment 1, trials in the temporal condition retained the original temporal pattern but were equitonal; trials in the pitch condition retained the original pitch pattern but were equitemporal; and trials in the melody condition contained both temporal and pitch patterns. In Experiment 2, one pattern (pitch or temporal) was shifted in phase and recombined with the other pattern to create the pitch and temporal conditions. In the melody condition, both patterns were shifted together. In both experiments, ratings in the temporal and pitch conditions were uncorrelated, and the melody condition ratings were accurately predicted by a linear combination of the pitch and temporal condition ratings. These results were consistent across musicians with varying levels of experience.     

The influence of height and key on the perceptual similarity of transposed melodies

In two experiments, the perceptual similarity between a strong tonal melody and various transpositions was investigated using a paradigm in which listeners compared the perceptual similarity of a melody and its transposition with that of the same melody and another transposition. The paradigm has the advantage that it provides a direct judgment regarding the similarity of transposed melodies. The experimental results indicate that the perceptual similarity of a strong tonal melody and its transposition is mainly determined by two factors: (1) the distance on the height dimension between the original melody and its transposition (pitch distance), and (2) the distance between keys as inferred from the circle of fifths (key distance). The major part of the variance is explained by the factor pitch distance, whereas key distance explains only a small part.     

Representation and execution of vocal motor programs for expert singing of tonal melodies

Three experiments were conducted to study motor programs used by expert singers to produce short tonal melodies. Each experiment involved a response-priming procedure in which singers prepared to sing a primary melody but on 50% of trials had to switch and sing a different (secondary) melody instead. In Experiment 1, secondary melodies in the same key as the primary melody were easier to produce than secondary melodies in a different key. Experiment 2 showed that it was the initial note rather than key per se that affected production of secondary melodies. In Experiment 3, secondary melodies involving exact transpositions were easier to sing than secondary melodies with a different contour than the primary melody. Also, switches between the keys of C and G were easier than those between C and E. Taken together, these results suggest that the initial note of a melody may be the most important element in the motor program, that key is represented in a hierarchical form, and that melodic contour is represented as a series of exact semitone offsets.     

The role of symmetry in the good continuation ratings of two-part tonal melodies

Subjects heard a series of two-part melodies, in which each part was a random sequence of eight pitches (Experiment 1) or five pitches(Experiment 2) from the diatonic scale. The task was to rate each melody on how well the second part followed the first. It was predicted that the presence of symmetry between the two parts would increase the perception of good continuation. In Experiment 1, two symmetrical relat/lons—(itinversion) and (itretrograde)—yielded melodies that were more highly rated than the control melodies, which consisted of nominally (itdifferent) parts. A third symmetry, the (itretrograde inversion), did not enhance good continuation ratings. In Experiment 2, inversions and retrograde inversions were compared with control melodies, using shorter sequences and pitches with equal durations. Again, inversions, but not retrograde inversions, were significantly preferred. The results suggest that the aesthetic judgment of good continuation depends at least partially on a cognitive analysis of the relation between the melody parts. The positive symmetry effects are further discussed in relation to other studies of symmetry transformations in the contexts of both musical sequences and visual arrays.     

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.     

The emotional meaning of harmonic intervals

The present study reexamines the hypothesis that there exist emotional attributions specific to simple musical elements. In Experiment 1, groups of participants, with varying musical expertise, rated the emotional meaning of four natural intervals heard as two harmonic sine waves. In Experiment 2, the higher tone was kept constant at an octave above the low tone used in Experiment 1, while the lower tone was constant. Attributions for each interval were positively correlated from one experimental session to another; despite the intervals differed in terms of their component pitches. Musicians gave the most reliable choices of meaning. In a third experiment, participants rated the emotional meaning of various unfamiliar ethnic melodies with expressions describing the intervals’ meaning based on the results of Experiment 1 and 2. There were distinct profiles of emotional meanings for each melody and these coincided with the meaning of intervals that constituted the surface and deep structure of each melody. The intervallic structures (i.e., the main intervals of the tunes) and respective chords for each melody were also presented aurally and participants’ ratings showed similar emotional profiles for these when compared to those of the melodies themselves.