Steven M. Demorest

Factors Influencing the Pitch-Matching of Junior High Boys

The skill of pitch-matching is a prerequisite for even the most casual musical participation. While singing accuracy has been carefully researched at the elementary level, there has been comparatively less research done with adolescents. The purpose of the study described here was to examine the influence of perceptual ability, task demands, and singing range on the pitch-matching performance of adolescent boys in various stages of the voice change. We found significant differences between certain, inconsistent, and uncertain singers in their perceptual skills and found that a contextual pitch-matching condition was significantly easier than a single-pitch condition. There was no difference by singing range. Future research should explore the progression of these skills longitudinally and continue to examine performance related to different task demands.

Developing Tomorrow's Music Teachers Today

Summary Our job as music teachers is much broader than working with those few students who wish to follow in our footsteps. We must encourage and inspire all of the students involved in our programs. Still, given the power-ful influence that this survey attrib-uted to the high school music teacher, we must consider how we might iden-tify and nurture potential teachers more directly. Take the time to speak with interested and promising stu-dents about how much music teach-ing has meant to you. Telling them how personally and professionally rewarding it has been will certainly influence students in strong and posi-tive ways. Of course, the opposite is true as well. Music teachers who find their profession unrewarding and unsatisfying will likely communicate these feelings to students. We some-times get caught up in all the small things that our jobs require and forget the fundamental reasons we became music teachers. Passion for what we do is the most powerful tool for moti-vating all students, and it will strike a chord with those who see themselves in our shoes. College music educators must also play a greater role. One way we can help is to communicate regularly with high school teachers about students who have shown an interest in music teaching. In our clinics and outreach programs, we could build in opportu-nities for high school musicians to try their hand at conducting. We must also begin to talk to our college and university schools of music and our state organizations about better schol-arship support for music education majors. Millions of childrens experiences with school music, now and in the future, depend on actions all of us take today. Good music teachers must be encouraged, nurtured, developed, and valued. All of us who currently teach must accept this responsibility We should not just assume that quali-ty music teachers will always be there. Talented young music students often have other abilities as well. Other pro-fessions, some more lucrative, com-pete for their interest. Active steps based on good information, such as the ones discussed above, might help encourage promising young students to commit to the enriching and rewarding profession of teaching music.

Enculturation Effects in Music Cognition The Role of Age and Music Complexity

The authors replicate and extend findings from previous studies of music enculturation by comparing music memory performance of children to that of adults when listening to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music. Forty-three children and 50 adults, all born and raised in the United States, completed a music memory test comprising unfamiliar excerpts of Western and Turkish classical music. Examples were selected at two levels of difficulty—simple and complex—based on texture, instrument variety, presence of simultaneous musical lines, and clarity of internal repetition. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their own culture than from an unfamiliar culture. Simple examples from both cultures were remembered significantly better than complex examples. Children performed as well as adults when remembering simple music from both cultures, whereas adults were better at remembering complex Western music. The results provide evidence that enculturation affects ones understanding of music structure before adulthood.

An fMRI investigation of the cultural specificity of music memory

This study explored the role of culture in shaping music perception and memory. We tested the hypothesis that listeners demonstrate different patterns of activation associated with music processing-particularly right frontal cortex-when encoding and retrieving culturally familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, with the latter evoking broader activation consistent with more complex memory tasks. Subjects (n = 16) were right-handed adults born and raised in the USA (n = 8) or Turkey (n = 8) with minimal music training. Using fMRI procedures, we scanned subjects during two tasks: (i) listening to novel musical examples from their own culture and an unfamiliar culture and (ii) identifying which among a series of brief excerpts were taken from the longer examples. Both groups were more successful remembering music of their home culture. We found greater activation for culturally unfamiliar music listening in the left cerebellar region, right angular gyrus, posterior precuneus and right middle frontal area extending into the inferior frontal cortex. Subjects demonstrated greater activation in the cingulate gyrus and right lingual gyrus when engaged in recall of culturally unfamiliar music. This study provides evidence for the influence of culture on music perception and memory performance at both a behavioral and neurological level.

Cultural constraints on music perception and cognition

Research suggests that music, like language, is both a biological predisposition and a cultural universal. While humans naturally attend to and process many of the psychophysical cues present in musical information, there is a great - and often culture-specific - diversity of musical practices differentiated in part by form, timbre, pitch, rhythm, and other structural elements. Musical interactions situated within a given cultural context begin to influence human responses to music as early as one year of age. Despite the worlds diversity of musical cultures, the majority of research in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of music has been conducted on subjects and stimuli from Western music cultures. From the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, identification of fundamental cognitive and neurological processes associated with music requires ascertaining that such processes are demonstrated by listeners from a broad range of cultural backgrounds and in relation to various musics across cultural traditions. This chapter will review current research regarding the role of enculturation in music perception and cognition and the degree to which cultural influences are reflected in brain function. Exploring music cognition from the standpoint of culture will lead to a better understanding of the core processes underlying perception and how those processes give rise to the worlds diversity of music forms and expressions.

ERP responses to cross-cultural melodic expectancy violations

In this preliminary study, we measured event‐related potentials (ERPs) to melodic expectancy violations in a cross‐cultural context. Subjects (n= 10) were college‐age students born and raised in the United States. Subjects heard 30 short melodies based in the Western folk tradition and 30 from North Indian classical music. Each melody was presented in its original and deviation form, and subjects were asked to judge the congruence of the melody. Results indicated that subjects found the Indian melodies less congruous overall and were less sensitive to deviations in the Indian melody condition. ERP data were partly consistent with the behavioral data with significant P600 responses to deviations in both cultural conditions, but less robust in the Indian context. Results are interpreted in light of previous research on listeners’ abilities to generate expectancies in unfamiliar cultures and the possibility of overlap in the scale systems influencing the findings.

Effects of Practice Schedule on Wind Instrument Performance: A Preliminary Application of a Motor Learning Principle

The effects of three practice schedules on beginning instrumental achievement were explored. A total of 19 seventh-grade clarinet and saxophone students completed one 18-minute practice session using either a blocked schedule causing a low level of cognitive (contextual) interference, a hybrid schedule causing a moderate level of interference, or a serial schedule causing a high level of interference. No main effects were found at immediate acquisition testing or 24-hr delayed retention testing for technical accuracy, attitude toward practice, or musicality. A significant practice Condition × Trial interaction was found for musicality. The discussion examines the discrepancy between technical and musical achievement. Recommendations are given for future research applying motor learning principles to instrumental music contexts.

Theoretical perspectives on singing accuracy: An introduction to the special issue on singing accuracy (part 1)

T HE PROBLEM OF POOR PITCH SINGING HAS been a topic of both practical and empirical concern for music educators for many years. Earlier efforts focused either on interventions that might help students develop the skills (Joyner, 1969; Yank Porter, 1977) or age-related changes in singing accuracy and proposed models for how such skills might develop (Welch, 1985; 1986). More recently, music educators have explored the influences of training, maturation, and task difficulty on children’s singing accuracy (Demorest & Clements, 2007; Nichols, 2013; Welch et al., 2009) and use of singing voice (Rutkowski & Miller, 2003). Researchers in psychology and cognitive neuroscience have become interested in poor pitch singing in adults as a kind of cognitive deficit, and have begun to explore the various conditions under which people have difficulty singing accurately (Dalla Bella & Berkowska, 2009; Hutchins & Peretz, 2012; Loui, Guenther, Mathys, & Schlaug, 2008; Pfordresher & Brown, 2007). One crucial piece of information lacking in these efforts is a shared definition of what constitutes accurate singing, as well as a shared approach to measuring this skill (see Dalla Bella and Demorest & Pfordresher this volume). While individual studies have proposed various assessments and scoring systems, the lack of a core set of tasks has made it extremely difficult to compare findings across studies, or to develop a sense of how prevalent poor pitch singing is in the general population across the lifespan. While several groups have developed or are developing batteries of tasks related to singing skills (cf. Berkowska & DallaBella, 2013; Cohen et al., 2012), one goal of the Seattle International Singing Research Symposium was to attempt to design a minimum set of tasks focused on measuring pitch accuracy in singing and associated skills that could be easily administered and scored. The ideal battery would be comprehensive enough to yield a meaningful set of data regarding singing accuracy performance, but short enough that various research groups could include it as a part of any larger battery of tasks that might be of particular interest to their research questions. Several papers in this issue involve measuring singing accuracy and related skills on multiple tasks (Dalla Bella, Demorest & Pfordresher, Hutchins) or the same task scored multiple ways (Dalla Bella, Demorest & Pfordresher, Rutkowski), but none use the exact set of procedures proposed here. The proposed protocol was designed to include information needed by the various investigators that are exploring poor pitch singing. What follows is a set of tasks that create a basic ‘‘singing accuracy protocol’’ for any group interested in contributing to this larger research effort. The following procedures were proposed during the Seattle International Singing Research Symposium (October 2013). We refer to the battery on the whole as the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol, or SSAP. Tasks are designed to provide a baseline for any study of singing that could be used to compare the performance of one study population directly to the performance of populations from other studies across different ages and levels of training. The tasks are designed to be short, easy to administer, and able to be scored acoustically through (relatively) automatic means or through a simple rating method. In order to standardize the administration of the SSAP, the practice examples, stimuli, and instructions for each task will eventually be prerecorded

The Integration of Pitch and Rhythm in Musical Judgment: Testing Age-Related Trends in Novice Listeners

Results of a previous study revealed that musically untrained listeners showed a significant, age-related increase in their sensitivity to rhythmic information when judging the degree of difference between a theme and selected pitch and rhythm variations. There was no corresponding increase in their sensitivity to pitch information, and there were no age-related differences in the overall integration process used to reach their judgments. The purpose of this study was to test the possibility that the developmental differences found in the earlier study were due to specific characteristics of the test melody used. Musical novices were randomly sampled from Grades 1, 5, and 9 of three elementary schools and three high schools from three different suburban school districts. Adult musical novices were chosen from elementary education majors tested at the beginning of their required music course. Results using a new, contrasting test melody confirmed the findings of the first study regarding the increased importance of rhythmic information. However, some melody-related differences were found. Implications for early music education experiences and future research in perceptual development are discussed.

Comparative Music Cognition: Cross-Species and Cross-Cultural Studies

The great majority of research in music psychology has focused on one species (humans) and one musical tradition (Western European tonal music). Although this approach has yielded a great deal of knowledge, there are limits to what we can learn about the musical mind from staying within these boundaries. By comparing music processing in humans and other species, we can gain valuable insights into the evolutionary roots of our musical capacities and identify those components of music cognition that are uniquely human. By comparing the processing of music across cultures, we can disentangle universal aspects of music cognition from aspects that are culture-specific. Thus both types of comparative research are needed for a full understanding of the musical mind. The past decade has seen exciting new developments in comparative research that invite further exploration of this frontier area within music psychology.