W. Jay Dowling

Recognition of transposed melodies: A key-distance effect in developmental perspective

Four experiments examined the possibility of a key-distance effect in a transposition detection task. Subjects heard standard melodies followed by comparison melodies presented in the same key, a musically near key or a musically far key. The task was to recognize comparisons that were exact transpositions of the standards, rejecting nontranspositions. Results suggested a largely invariant key-distance effect with nontransposition comparisons (lures); same- and near-key lures evoked more false alarms than far-key lures. The variables of musical experience, age of subject, and familiarity of melody affected the level of transposition-recognition performance but did not consistently affect the size of the key-distance effect. The results support the psychological reality of key distance and are consistent with both musical and nonmusical-auditory theories of its effects. The key-distance effect was not found with transposition comparisons (targets), a result with implications for the separability of key and interval information in short-term memory for melodies.

Aiming attention in pitch and time in the perception of interleaved melodies

Listeners succeeded in following a melody interleaved at 6 or 8 notes/sec with distractor notes in the same pitch range and of the same timbre. Their ability to perform this auditory “hidden-figures” task depended on the rhythmic control of attention on the basis of expectancies dew, loped through perceptual learning with melodies in the listeners’ culture. Listeners appear to have aimed expectancies in pitch and time at regions where events critical to the identification of melodies are likely to occur—regions defining “expectancy windows” through which target notes are perceived. Events in pitch and time regions outside these expectancy windows were not perceived as accurately as events within the window. Listeners discerned interleaved melodies whose notes fellon the consistent temporal beat of a pattern better than they did melodies whose notes fell off the beat. Expectancies could also be aimedoffthe beat: expected target notes occurringoff the beat in a syncopated rhythm were judged more accurately than unexpected notes occurringon the beat. Listeners found it more difficult to judge the pitch of target notes that fell outside the expected pitch region than that of notes within the expected region. The interleaved distractor notes appear to be instrumental in narrowing attention to within the expectancy windows. When the interleaved distractors were removed, unexpected notes becamemore salient than expected ones.

The Development of Music Perception and Cognition

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the development of music perception and cognition. An adult listening attentively to a piece of music and understanding it performs an enormous amount of information processing very rapidly. Most of this processing is carried out automatically below the level of conscious analysis, because there is no time for reflective thought on each detail as the piece steadily progresses. This process is closely parallel to what happens when a native speaker of a language listens to and understands a sentence. A point to be emphasized is the ease and rapidity with which adults perform complex cognitive tasks in domains of speech and music familiar to them, and the degree to which that facility depends on prior experience. The implicit knowledge of adults is built on elements present even in infancy and the importance of melodic and rhythmic contours, the use of discrete, steady pitch levels, the organization of rhythmic patterns into a steady beat and an overlay of more complicated rhythms, and octave equivalence. These elements provide the groundwork for perceptual learning and acculturation throughout life to build upon.

Development of Musical Schemata in Children's Spontaneous Singing

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the general pattern of development of childrens singing, and then presents an analysis of the spontaneous songs of two children illustrating schematic control over the melodic and rhythmic contours of the phrases used in the songs. A brief study of the childrens memory for some of their own songs is presented. The major points of the early development of the childs singing and of what typical songs are like around the age of two years are tabulated. Musical development investigations is carried out in the context of existing theory and data indicating that the child develops the cognitive components of adult auditory information processing piece by piece over the first 8 years of life. The chapter analyses the contour control in spontaneous songs in age range from 1:0 to 3:6 years. Dimension involved in the characterization of schemata is that of the level of psychological reality they are thought to have.

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.

Recognition of familiar and unfamiliar melodies in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease

We tested normal young and elderly adults and elderly Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients on recognition memory for tunes. In Experiment 1, AD patients and age-matched controls received a study list and an old/new recognition test of highly familiar, traditional tunes, followed by a study list and test of novel tunes. The controls performed better than did the AD patients. The controls showed the “mirror effect” of increased hits and reduced false alarms for traditional versus novel tunes, whereas the patients false-alarmed as often to traditional tunes as to novel tunes. Experiment 2 compared young adults and healthy elderly persons using a similar design. Performance was lower in the elderly group, but both younger and older subjects showed the mirror effect. Experiment 3 produced confusion between preexperimental familiarity and intraexperimental familiarity by mixing traditional and novel tunes in the study lists and tests. Here, the subjects in both age groups resembled the patients of Experiment 1 in failing to show the mirror effect. Older subjects again performed more poorly, and they differed qualitatively from younger subjects in setting stricter criteria for more nameable tunes. Distinguishing different sources of global familiarity is a factor in tune recognition, and the data suggest that this type of source monitoring is impaired in AD and involves different strategies in younger and older adults.

Context Effects on Melody Recognition: Scale-Step versus Interval Representations

A basic question in cognitive psychology concerns ways in which sensory information is represented in memory. Listeners performed a long-term transposition recognition task in which brief melodies were presented with a chordal context that defined their scale-step interpretations. Context either remained constant or changed at test. In two experiments listeners with moderate amounts of musical experience performed well with constant context but at chance with shifting context. Inexperienced listeners (as well as professionals in one of the studies) performed equally well regardless of context. This result suggests that inexperienced listeners represented melodies as sequences of pitch intervals that remained invariant across context shifts. In contrast, moderately experienced listeners appear to have represented melodies as scale-step sequences that were affected by context. Professionals, while capable of scale-step representation, were able to use a flexible memory-retrieval system to avoid errors with changed context. A third experiment showed that moderately experienced listeners were able to base long-term recognition on either contour or scale-step information, depending on instructions. These results suggest that the scale-step representation used by moderately experienced listeners involved both contour and scale information.

The time course of recognition of novel melodies

Seven experiments explored the time course of recognition of brief novel melodies. In a continuous-running-memory task, subjects recognized melodic transpositions following delays up to 2.0 min. The delays were either empty or filled with other melodies. Test items included exact transpositions (T), same-contour lures (SC) with altered pitch intervals, and different-contour lures (DC). DCs differed from Ts in the pattern of ups and downs of pitch. With this design, we assessed subjects’ discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals (T/SC discrimination) as well as their discrimination of contour changes (T/DC). We used both artificial and “real” melodies. Artificial melodies differed in conformity to a musical key, being tonal or atonal. After empty delays, T/DC discrimination was superior to T/SC discrimination. Surprisingly, after filled delays, T/SC discrimination was superior to T/DC. When only filled delays were tested, T/SC discrimination did not decline over the longest delays. T/DC performance declined more than did T/SC performance across both empty and filled delays. Tonality was an important factor only for T/SC discrimination after filled delays. T/DC performance was better with rhythmically intact folk melodies than with artificial isochronous melodies. Although T/SC performance improved over filled delays, it did not overtake T/DC performance. These results suggest that (1) contour and pitch-interval information make different contributions to recognition, with contour dominating performance after brief empty delays and pitch intervals dominating after longer filled delays; (2) a coherent tonality facilitates the encoding of pitch-interval patterns of melodies; and (3) the rich melodic—rhythmic contours of real melodies facilitate T/DC discrimination. These results are discussed in terms of automatic and controlled processing of melodic information.

Memory decreases for prose, but not for poetry

Memory for details of text generally declines relatively rapidly, whereas memory for propositional and contextbased meanings is generally more resilient over time. In the present study, we investigated short-term memory for two kinds of verbal material: prose and poetry. Participants heard or read prose stories or poems in which a phrase near the start of the passage served as a target. The text continued, and after various delays, memory was tested with a repetition of the target (old verbatim; O), a paraphrased lure (P), or a lure in which the meaning was chang. For prose, memory for surface details (as measured by O/P discrimination) declined over time (Experiments 2–4), as was expect. For poetry, memory for surface details (O/P discrimination) did not decline with increasing delay (Experiments 1, 3, and 4). This lack of decline in memory for the surface details of poetry is discussed in relation to similar results previously observed for musical excerpts (Dowling, Tillmann, & Ayers, 2001), suggesting that a particular role is played by the temporal organization and rhythmic structure of poetry and music.

Emotion and Meaning

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses some of the ways by which music represents and excites emotion. Emotional responses to music run the gamut from laughing and crying and chills going up and down the spine to cool appraisal of technique. Not only do listeners have emotional reactions to music, but pieces of music also represent emotions in ways that can be recognized by listeners. Indexical representation involves the direct association of a musical event with some extramusical object or event, so that emotions previously associated with the extramusical object come to be associated with the music. Music can represent emotions iconically because the ebb and flow of tensions and relaxations in the music mirror the form of emotional tensions and relaxations. Though the representation of emotion in musical icons is necessarily vague, listeners find it quite natural to attach general emotional labels to pieces of music. It seems plausible that autonomic nervous system (ANS) arousal evolved as a fast-acting warning system to initiate activation of the organism in the face of potential danger.