Steven M Demorest

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Music Studies

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of daily singing instruction on the singing accuracy of young children and whether accuracy differed across four singing tasks. In a pretest-posttest design over seven months we compared the singing accuracy of kindergarteners in a school receiving daily singing instruction from a music specialist to...

Research on adults who identify as “tone deaf” suggest that their poor musical self-concept is shaped by a view of themselves as non-singers even when their perceptual skills and singing ability are not significantly worse than the general population. Many of these adults self-selected out of further participation as children but expressed regret a...

The development of singing accuracy, and the relative role of training versus maturation, is a central issue for both music educators and those within music cognition. Although various studies have focused on singing accuracy in different age groups, to date we know of no data sets that maintain the consistency in recruitment, methodology, and meas...

Whereas much of research in music and neuroscience is aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which the human brain facilitates music, emerging interest in the neuromusic community aims to translate basic music research into clinical and educational applications. In the present paper, we explore the problems of poor pitch perception and production...

WE HAVE AMPLE EVIDENCE OF CULTURAL BIAS influencing music cognition in a variety of ways including memory. The purpose of this study was to explore the influence of various musical elements on Western-born listeners' cross-cultural recognition memory performance. Specifically, we were interested in whether the enculturation effect found in previous...

Previous research has led to the hypothesis that poor-pitch singing is the result of a weakness in the auditory/vocal loop. The present study evaluated this hypothesis in a training paradigm that used visual feedback to augment potentially faulty auditory-vocal associations. Following pretest with the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol (SSAP), parti...

The purpose of this study was to analyze a large sample of volunteers from the general population who were tested with an identical online measure of singing accuracy. A sample of 632 participants completed the Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol (SSAP), a standardized measure of singing accuracy, available online, that includes a test of pitch discr...

The Seattle Singing Accuracy Protocol (SSAP) is a set of standardized tasks designed to measure pitch accuracy in singing. All singing tests are calibrated to the participant’s comfortable range through an automated range-finding procedure. In addition, we measure pitch discrimination ability and collect information on each participant’s musical ba...

Purpose: Participating in a group-singing program may be beneficial to healthy aging through engaging in active music-making activities and breathing exercises. The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and impact of a 12-week group singing program on cognitive function, lung health and quality of life (QoL) of older...

Independent practice is a critical skill for developing musicianship. The ensemble classroom serves as a primary location for fostering this development in students, and the teachers’ attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors regarding independent practice influence what is presented in class. Understanding the teachers’ positions and how they reflect rese...

Since the arrival of the first charter school in Minnesota in 1991, charter schools have become one of the largest movements in educational reform. In recent years, research has emerged that has compared the effectiveness of charter schools with their traditional school counterparts. The purpose of this study was to compare the extent of music offe...

All normally developing children acquire an understanding of the music and language of their culture without explicit instruction. This is known as enculturation. The process of musical enculturation is not well understood, but researchers have hypothesized that some form of statistical learning similar to that which influences language acquisition...

The goal of the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience is to highlight the theoretical and methodological advances in the field of cultural neuroscience and the role that these scientific advances can play in understanding how to close the gap in population mental health disparities. Population mental health disparities may arise due to unequal a...

NOTE: There is no written technical report associated with this posting, but Research gate doesn't have a category for sharing online tools. This online measure of singing accuracy and related skills will assess performance in real time and give participants a score at the end of the 15-20 minute procedure. It is anonymous and available to the gene...

Previous researchers have found that both adults and children demonstrate better memory for novel music from their own music culture than from an unfamiliar music culture. It was the purpose of this study to determine whether this “enculturation effect” could be mediated through an extended intensive instructional unit in another culture’s music. F...

The conference entitled "The Neurosciences and Music-IV: Learning and Memory'' was held at the University of Edinburgh from June 9-12, 2011, jointly hosted by the Mariani Foundation and the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development, and involving nearly 500 international delegates. Two opening workshops, three large and vibrant poster ses...

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...

One of the most fundamental questions in the study of human learning has been the historical debate over the role of nature, our biological capabilities or predispositions, versus nurture, the knowledge we acquire through our experiences in the world. This debate has been particularly significant in the study of music learning, which is peopled wit...

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 co...

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...

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,...

1. Introduction 2. Sound Elements: Pitch and Timbre 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Musical Sound Systems 2.3 Linguistic Sound Systems 2.4 Sound Category Learning as a Key Link 2.5 Conclusion Appendices 3. Rhythm 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Rhythm in Music 3.3 Rhythm in Speech 3.4 Interlude: Rhythm in Poetry and Song 3.5 Non-Periodic Aspects of Rhythm as a Key Link...

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 excer...

The purpose of this study was to test the cross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts...

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 si...

In two separate studies, we examined fifth graders' preference for authentic and arranged versions of world music recordings, the relationship of those preference ratings to familiarity, and teachers' ability to predict student preferences. In the first study, intact classes of fifth-grade students were randomly assigned to an authentic or arranged...

In two separate studies, we examined fifth graders' preference for authentic and arranged versions of world music recordings, the relationship of those preference ratings to familiarity, and teachers' ability to predict student preferences. In the first study, intact classes of fifth-grade students were randomly assigned to an authentic or arranged...

Research on the recognition and identification of well-known songs has found that melodic patterns are a more robust cue than temporal patterns. This study further explores the possibility of improving identification of rhythm patterns under a mismatched melody identification condition and what influence musical training has on memory performance....

Contemporary music education in many countries has begun to incorporate not only the dominant music of the culture, but also a variety of music from around the world. Although the desirability of such a broadened curriculum is virtually unquestioned, the specific function of these musical encounters and their potential role in children's cognitive...

The popular view of music as a "universal" language ignores the privileged position of the cultural insider in comprehending musical information unique to their own tradition. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that listeners would demonstrate different neural activity in response to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music and th...

The purpose of this study was to compare junior high boys' performance on two tasks in order to explore the relationship between aural perception and vocal production. The perceptual task involved manipulating a tuning dial to match a synthesizer pitch to a prerecorded reference pitch. The production task involved singing back a pitch after hearing...

Designed for both the practicing choral director and the choral methods student, this is a compact and comprehensive overview of the many teaching methods, strategies, materials, and assessments available for choral sight-singing instruction. Sight-singing is an important, if sometimes neglected, facet of choral music education that often inspires...

This article reviews the research on sightsinging instruction and achievement in the secondary choral ensemble and the variables that are related to student success at both the group and individual level. Research on instructional time, methods, materials, and achievement in sightsinging are divided into descriptive and predictive studies. The arti...

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of individual testing, in conjunction with group instruction, on students' sight-singing skills. A quasi-experimental study was designed to test the following prediction: Choir students given a regular program of individual testing will show a significantly greater improvement in individual sight-...

This article reviews the research on sightsinging instruction and achievement in the secondary choral ensemble and the variable that are related to student success at both the group and individual level. Research on instructional time, methods, materials, and achievement in sightsinging are divided into descriptive and predictive studies. The artic...

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...

In this study, we examined individual sight-singing skills of choir members in relation to their private musical training, their choral experience, the difficulty of the melodic material, and the system used for group sight-singing instruction. The subjects (N=414) were drawn from both the first and second choirs of four Texas high schools. Two sch...

There are numerous obstacles a researcher confronts when attempting to design a more realistic study of music perception. The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenge of ecological validity in perceptual research design. The paper will focus on three elements central to ecological validity in music research: the musical context, the judgme...

The purpose of this study was to examine qualitative differences between experts and novice listeners of various ages in (a) the process of integrating pitch and rhythm information to form a single judgment of similarity or difference and (b) the perceptual value of certain pitch and rhythm transformations when they occur simultaneously. Difference...

The survey reported here was originally created for the book Building Choral Excellence: Teaching Sight-singing in the Choral Rehearsal. However, that book presented results in a limited form from a smaller sample of participants. This report includes responses from an additional 94 participants, limits the sample to only middle and high school cho...

Typescript. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1989. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 128-132).

Includes abstract. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1989. Bibliography: leaves 128-132. Microfilm of typescript. s