The abstraction of musical ideas

Music presents information both sequentially, in the form of musical phrases, and simultaneously, in the form of chord structure. The ability to abstract musical structure presented sequentially and simultaneously was investigated using modified versions of the Bransford and Franks’ (1971) paradigm. Listeners heard subsets of musical ideas. The abstraction hypothesis predicted (1) false recognition of novel instances of the abstracted musical idea, (2) confidence of “recognition” should increase as recognition items approximate the complete musical idea, (3) correct rejection of “noncases,” which deviate from the acquired musical structure. Experiment 1 investigated sequential abstraction by using four-phrase folk melodies as musical ideas. Predictions 1 and 3 were confirmed, but the false recognition rate decreased as the number of phrases increased. Listeners were sensitive to improper combinations of phrases and to novel melodies different from melodies presented during acquisition. Experiment 2 investigated simultaneous abstraction using four-voice Bach chorales as musical ideas. Listeners spontaneously integrated choral subsets into holistic musical ideas. Musically trained listeners were better than naive listeners at identifying noncases.