Memory for Melodies

Abstract

Memory for music presents a paradox. On the one hand, memory for music that people have already learned can be astonishingly
good, both in extent and longevity. On the former point, consider how many tunes an average person could recognize, or even
recall. No one has even attempted to measure the limits of musical memory. Concerning longevity, older adults can show excellent
retention of music learned decades previously (Bartlett and Snelus 1981; Rubin et al. 1998). Even early-stage Alzheimer’s
disease patients can almost perfectly discriminate familiar tunes such as patriotic and holiday songs from musically similar
but unfamiliar tunes (Bartlett et al. 1995). And this memory can persist not just for songs that have words, but also for
purely melodic motives, and without much context. For instance, it is not uncommon to turn on the radio and hear just a few
notes of a tune, and be able immediately to hum along or at least recognize the tune as familiar.

Full text

233
8.1 Introductory Comments
Memory for music presents a paradox. On the one hand, memory for music that
people have already learned can be astonishingly good, both in extent and longevity.
On the former point, consider how many tunes an average person could recognize,
or even recall. No one has even attempted to measure the limits of musical memory.
Concerning longevity, older adults can show excellent retention of music learned
decades previously (Bartlett and Snelus 1981; Rubin et al. 1998). Even early-stage
Alzheimer’s disease patients can almost perfectly discriminate familiar tunes such
as patriotic and holiday songs from musically similar but unfamiliar tunes (Bartlett
et al. 1995). And this memory can persist not just for songs that have words, but
also for purely melodic motives, and without much context. For instance, it is not
uncommon to turn on the radio and hear just a few notes of a tune, and be able
immediately to hum along or at least recognize the tune as familiar.
Musical memory also shows its persistence by being veridical, or capturing
aspects of the music reasonably faithfully. Several researchers have shown that the
absolute pitch of familiar music is remembered fairly well, within two semitones,
even among nonmusicians and nonpossessors of absolute pitch (Halpern 1989;
Levitin 1994; Schellenberg and Trehub 2003), as is tempo (Halpern 1988; Levitin
and Cook 1996). Some evidence also suggests that even judgments of musical emotion
can be extracted from remembered music similarly to those extracted from sounded
music (Lucas et al. 2010). These demonstrations are notable because the identity of
music comes from the relationships between successive pitches and temporal units,
so the memory for absolute tempo and pitch seems to be beyond what is required
for making sense of music.
On the other hand, memory for music can be very poor, particularly when
learning new music. Typically, memory for music is assessed by recognition, as
A.R. Halpern (*)
Psychology Department, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA
e-mail: ahalpern@bucknell.edu
Chapter 8
Memory for Melodies
Andrea R. Halpern and James C. Bartlett
M.R. Jones et al. (eds.), Music Perception, Springer Handbook of Auditory Research 36,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6114-3_8, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

234 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
recall invites difficult issues of production competence. Thus this chapter does not
consider the kind of deliberate memorization for later recall required in musical
performance. But even the simplest kind of recognition test for melodies shows
how poor musical memory can be, in comparison to other kinds of memory.
A student was recently setting up a study of recognition memory for paintings.
The study session consisted of viewing each of 28 paintings for 3 s, followed by
45 min of visual illusion distraction, and then a surprise old/new recognition test
with 28 old and 28 new paintings. Performance was virtually perfect and measures
had to be taken to make the task harder. Almost legendary is Standing’s (1973)
finding that memory for pictures is nearly limitless (10,000 items were presented
in that study).
In contrast, Halpern and O’Connor (2000) designed a music recognition memory
test that would be feasible for early-stage Alzheimer’s patients. Eight novel tunes were
presented for incidental encoding, followed immediately by eight old and eight new
tunes. Pilot work showed that young adult normal controls could not do this task much
above chance levels, necessitating two presentations of the tunes during learning (which
brought performance up to a respectable but not overwhelming level). Using longer
study sequences, Halpern and Müllensiefen (2008) presented 40 unfamiliar melodies
under various encoding conditions, followed by old/new recognition of 80 tunes, using
a 6-point confidence scale. Area-under-the-Receiver-Operating-Characteristic (ROC)-
curve scores were about 0.70 (0.50 = chance; 1.0 = perfect performance), which is in
the range of performance levels in quite a few of the studies reviewed herein. Again, the
results are respectable but not spectacular, and far below recognition levels for other rich
materials.
This paradox is interesting, most obviously because it raises the question of how
new music becomes well learned, if learning is so laborious at first or second expo-
sure. It is also an intriguing puzzle because music is eventually learned even by
nonmusicians, who have few analytic strategies to help them, and even for music
with few semantic associations or internal references, such as classical themes.
In other domains, variability in learning can be partly accounted for by quality
of encoding. In Levels of Processing (LOP) studies (Craik and Lockhart 1972),
memory researchers can often increase quality of retrieval by imposing or encour-
aging elaborative encoding tasks, such as asking people to generate a synonym for
a to-be-remembered word. Perhaps music learning is often difficult because listeners
do not (or cannot) use elaborative encoding. However, evidence suggests rather that
this memory “law” does not seem to obtain in music. As one indication, a recent
database search for “Levels of Processing” and “music” turned up virtually no
entries. A few studies have shown encoding task effects for well-known tunes
(judging familiarity of the tune produced better recognition than judging what
instrument was playing the tune; Peretz et al. 1998), but memory for well-known
music may also rely on semantic or other nonmusical strategies. Certainly both of
the current authors have failed to find LOP effects for unfamiliar music on numer-
ous occasions (some published, some languishing in bottom drawers). Thus it is
likely that factors other than conditions of encoding are more important in memory
for music than in other domains.

2358 Memory for Melodies
This chapter examines some of the other factors that appear to modulate tune
learning. (Note: Many of the studies considered here use simple, single-line melodies,
without words. However, a few use fully realized music with orchestration and
harmonies, which are pointed out when appropriate). Long-term retention (Sect. 8.2.1)
is one focus, as detailed in the preceding text, but another focus is short-term reten-
tion such as that needed for immediate same–different comparisons (Sect. 8.2.2).
Other factors affecting memory for music include aspects of the tunes, for example,
degree of familiarity of the item (Sect. 8.2), as well as familiarity and well-formedness
of the musical system from which the tunes are derived (Sect. 8.4). The chapter also
considers temporal factors, such as the influence of retention interval on what
listeners learn about melodies (Sect. 8.3), as well as two important aspects of listeners
themselves: their musical experience (Sect. 8.5) and their age (ranging for current
purposes from young to senior adult, Sect. 8.6). It turns out that these last two
factors have some expected, but also some unexpected relationships (or absence
thereof) with retention of music. The relationship between these two variables is
also intriguing, on the supposition that benefits from increased domain-related
experience might mitigate some age-related declines in memory. As seen further on,
this does not appear to be the case, unfortunately. The chapter concludes with some
thoughts on how memory for music may be similar to and different than memory
for other kinds of materials.
8.2 Familiarity and Nameability of Melodies
Perhaps the most powerful variable affecting music recognition has been referred
to in the literature as familiarity. The term is not ideal, for at least two different
reasons. First, in most of the relevant research, familiarity has been operationalized
through a comparison of tunes unknown to participants prior to a study with well-
known tunes they had heard frequently in life. Although in general the investigators
have attempted to avoid confounding “familiarity” with perceptual and musicological
features of the stimuli (e.g., tonality, or adherence to a scale, and rhythm), another
confounding factor has been less often addressed: that between the extent of prior
“real life” exposure to a melody and its verbal identifiability, through, for example,
recall of its title, some of its lyrics, or identifying contextual information (“it’s
theme song of the musical ‘Cats’”). In the remainder of this chapter, these two
aspects of tune knowledge are referred to as “real-life exposure” and “nameability.”
One key point that emerges in this discussion is that some of what researchers know
about familiarity effects might be better characterized as nameability effects.
A second problem with “familiarity” is that a wealth of evidence from the
human memory literature supports a dual-process theory of memory: the notion that
two cognitive processes underlie retrieval, referred to as “familiarity” and “recollec-
tion” (see Yonelinas 2002 for a review). Familiarity is viewed as an overall feeling
of “oldness” that can vary in strength but lacks any context cues (“I cannot place
that tune but it sure sounds familiar”), whereas recollection refers to the conscious

236 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
recollection of detailed perceptual and contextual information about a prior experi-
ence (“I heard that same song last night at a party”). This state of affairs can lead
to mind-bending tongue-twisters (e.g., “familiarity affected both recollection and
familiarity”) that can cause confusion. To minimize such confusion, the term “prior
knowledge” refers to comparisons of well-known to novel tunes (or musical
genres). A distinction is made in cases where a prior knowledge effect might be
better characterized as a “nameability effect” as opposed to a “real-life exposure
effect.” The terms “recollection” and “familiarity” are used in accordance with the
human memory literature, as mentioned previously.
8.2.1 Long-Term Memory
A task showing dramatic prior knowledge effects is long-term recognition memory.
The most common method of testing such memory is that of presenting a variable-
length sequence or list of stimuli, depending on how memorable the stimuli are,
followed by a test including “old” items from the study list intermixed with “new”
items not heard before. The test typically follows the study phase by 10–30 min,
which qualifies this paradigm as testing “long-term” memory, at least in contrast to
comparison of two tunes played in succession (see next section). Performance
accuracy is typically assessed by examining both hit rates (the proportion of old items
called “old”) and false-alarm rates (the proportion of new items called “old”), with a
high hit rate and low false-alarm rate signifying good performance. Recognition judg-
ments are substantially more accurate for well-known tunes than for novel tunes
(Bartlett et al. 1995). However, some nuances surrounding this basic observation offer
valuable clues as to the nature of the processes that support melodic memory.
Bartlett et al. (1995) employed a trained musician to compose a set of novel
tunes that matched a set of novel tunes in number of notes, average interval size,
rhythmic units and general pleasantness. In two of their experiments, the well-
known and novel tunes were presented in separate study lists, each followed by a
recognition test. Both young adults and healthy older people (59–80 years old)
showed higher hit rates and lower false-alarm rates for the well-known tunes than
for the novel tunes, suggesting a difference in recognition accuracy. This pattern is
quite often observed in comparisons of easier and more difficult items in recogni-
tion memory (Glanzer and Adams 1985), so it was not surprising. What was
surprising was the absence of this pattern when the well-known and novel tunes
were intermixed in the study lists and tests. In this case the hit rates were dramatically
higher for the well-known tunes than for the novel tunes, as was true in the separate
lists. However, the false-alarm rates were approximately equal for the two tune
types. In terms of signal detection theory, old–new discrimination was much greater
for well-known tunes than for novel tunes, but there also was a bias to judge the
well-known tunes as “old.”
What might it mean that the intermixed list of novel and well-known tunes prevented
people from suppressing false alarms to the well-known tunes? One plausible

2378 Memory for Melodies
hypothesis is that old–new judgments in tune recognition are based to a substantial
extent on subjective familiarity, in the absence of recollection of information
specifying the source of the familiarity (e.g., the studied items versus last year’s
Christmas party). Familiarity will be much stronger for well-known tunes than
novel tunes, and this will tend to increase the hit rate advantage of well-known
tunes, while possibly increasing false-alarm rates for those same well-known tunes.
In a between-list design, where well-known and novel tunes are presented and then
tested separately, listeners can easily compensate for this tendency by adopting a
more stringent recognition criterion for well-known tunes than novel tunes. In other
words, listeners might only say “old” to a well-known tune if the tune seems very
familiar. In a within-list (intermixed) design, however, this would be harder to do
as the listener would need to adjust that criterion trial by trial. There is substantial
evidence that participants often fail to adjust their recognition criteria for individual
items in a single recognition test (see Benjamin 2008 for a review).
Some findings of McAuley et al. (2004) underscore the importance of familiarity
in the absence of recollection, in recognition memory for tunes. These investigators
compared memory for novel and well-known melodies in a variant of the standard
recognition task designed to test knowledge of how recently and how frequently
tunes had been studied. The novel melodies were composed for the experiment in
a range of major and minor keys, rhythms, speeds, and melodic contours, with the
goal that they would be at least as distinctive as the well-known melodies and
approximately as long (mean = 12.3 notes versus 15.6 notes for the well-known
tunes). The participants heard a sequence of novel and well-known melodies in
which half of the items were presented one time and the others were presented three
times. One day later, they heard a second sequence of (different) melodies, con-
structed in the same way. The second list was followed by two memory tests, one
in which subjects judged the frequency of items (one versus three presentations),
and a second in which they judged the recency of items (same day versus previous
day). Frequency judgments were slightly less accurate for novel tunes than for
well-known tunes, but discrimination between thrice-presented items and once-
presented items was well above chance for both. By contrast, recency judgments
were substantially less accurate for the novel tunes than for well-known tunes, and
discrimination between day-1 items and day-2 items approximated chance for the
novel tunes. Moreover, the recency judgments to novel tunes were affected more by
frequency than by recency itself. That is, thrice-presented tunes heard on day 1
received more “same day” judgments than did once-presented tunes heard on day 2.
These findings suggest that, in the case of novel tunes, time of presentation is
poorly recollected and that memory judgments are based for the most part on famil-
iarity strength.
What about judgments to well-known tunes? The improved recency judgments
with well-known tunes suggest that recollection is greater with such tunes than with
novel tunes. However, McAuley et al. performed an analysis suggesting that this
difference reflects the often high nameability of well-known tunes rather than the
fact that they have been experienced in life. Specifically, the authors found a reliable
positive correlation between the accuracy of recency judgments to well-known

238 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
tunes and the nameability of these tunes (based on a naming test administered to
each participant at the end of the experimental session, r = 0.52). Hence, the recol-
lection advantage of well-known tunes is due not simply to the fact that they are
known; it depends on nameability.
A link between the nameability of tunes and the process of recollection has also
been supported in a study that actually tested melodic recall, unlike experiments
considered heretofore that tested simply recognition and related judgments
(frequency and recency) Using a unique methodology, Korenman and Peynircioğlu
(2004) presented tunes paired with animal names, followed by tests of (1) recall of
the animal names in response to the melodies and (2) recall of the melodies in
response to the animal names (the hummed responses were recorded and later
scored). Participants in three different groups received: (1) original recordings of
well-known melodies with full orchestration, (2) single-line versions of these same
melodies played on a synthesizer, and (3) single-line versions of unknown melodies
played on the synthesizer. The same animal names, paired at random with the melo-
dies, were used in all conditions.
The recall results were straightforward: Recall of names in response to melodies
was better than recall of melodies in response to names, perhaps because it was
easier to guess a correct name than to guess (through humming) a correct melody.
Correct recall was substantially higher for well-known tunes than for novel tunes,
despite the fact that the study list was shorter in the novel-tune condition to mini-
mize floor effects. As in the McAuley et al. (2004) study, the authors assessed
knowledge of the names of the well-known tunes in the last phase of the study.
Associative recall (both melody-from-name and name-from-melody) in the group
with above-average knowledge of the tune names (“experts”) was approximately
twice that in the group less knowledgeable about the tune names (“nonexperts”),
indicating that nameability of melodies is an important factor in recollecting con-
textual information. In considering these data, it is important to remember that the
participants were tested on their memory for new associations between melodic
snippets and animal names, not actual tune titles or lyrics. Thus, the findings indi-
cate that recollecting the verbal context of a melody’s presentation – or the melodic
context of a word’s presentation – is better if the melodies are well known, and
especially if they are nameable.
It is interesting to note that when the participants in the Korenman and
Peynircioğlu (2004) study could not recall an animal name in response to a melody
or a melody in response to a name, they estimated their chances of recognizing the
association (i.e., they made a “feeling of knowing” judgment). Moreover, all of the
participants were subsequently tested on associative recognition (i.e., they
attempted to select which of three names belonged with each of a set of melodies
and which of three melodies belonged with each of a set of names). Neither feeling-
of-knowing ratings nor associative recognition differed between well-known and
novel tunes or between “experts” and “nonexperts” with the well-known tunes. This
finding is important because it demonstrates that the nameability of a tune does not
affect memory for contextual information so long as the pairing of a tune and its
context at study are reinstated at test (as in an associative recognition test). Rather,

2398 Memory for Melodies
the effect of nameability is on recollection of contextual information not physically
available at test.
In sum, the evidence suggests that recognition of well-known tunes differs from
recognition of novel tunes in two important ways. First, well-known tunes create a
stronger feeling of familiarity, and because familiarity is an important basis for
old–new judgments in recognition memory, participants show a bias to judge well-
known tunes as “old” (i.e., heard previously at study). They show this bias only in
within-list designs presumably because, in between-list designs, they are able to use
a more stringent criterion for recognizing well-known tunes than for recognizing
novel tunes. When such criterion adjustments are difficult, as they are in within-list
designs, the high familiarity of well-known tunes often leads to “old” judgments
even when these tunes are new. Second, many well-known tunes are more nameable
than novel tunes, and nameability is linked to the power of tunes to spur recollec-
tion of contextual and associative information. Recollection is a hallmark of
“episodic memory” (Tuvling 1983), a major component of memory – possibly
involving a dedicated brain system (Schacter and Tulving 1994) – that mediates our
ability to consciously re-experience events from our personal pasts. Performance in
tests of episodic memory are seriously impaired in amnesic patients who have
suffered damage in medial–temporal and prefrontal brain regions, and McAuley
et al. (2004) make the interesting observation that the memory performance of
healthy adults with unfamiliar (and unnameable) tunes resembles that of amnesic
individuals with well-known words (i.e., frequency and recency are confused). The
brain processes of episodic memory, presumably intact in healthy adults tested by
McAuley et al., cannot be engaged in the processing of tunes that cannot be
uniquely identified or named.
An alternative hypothesis holds that hard-to-identify tunes engage episodic
memory processes, but suffer with respect to elaborative encoding. A wealth of
evidence suggests that successful recollection in tests of episodic memory depends
on elaborative encoding when the item is first presented (Yonelinas 2002, and see
Sect. 8.1), and that such elaborative encoding aids in the creation of distinctive
representations that yield good recollection because they are less confusable with
other memories at retrieval (see, e.g., Eysenck 1979). Nameability may improve
elaborative encoding of the type that produces distinctive and retrievable memory
codes. For example, an elaborative encoding of an unknown tune might include
information that it sounds very pleasant and might make a good Christmas carol.
However, such an encoding is likely to be applicable to several different tunes in a
study sequence, and so it is not distinctive. By contrast, elaborative encoding of a
nameable tune might be highly distinctive (e.g., “that was mother’s favorite
Christmas carol”), supporting recollection in a subsequent test.
How familiarity and nameability are linked to episodic memory is an important
issue for future research to address. However, it likewise is important to understand
the processes underlying the detection that a tune is familiar and the retrieval of its
name. Dalla Bella et al. (2003) explored this issue by presenting the beginnings of
known and novel tunes in a “gating” paradigm in which listeners first heard the first
note of a tune, then the first two notes, then the first three notes, and so on until they

240 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
judged the tune to be familiar with high confidence on each of three successive
trials. The known melodies had been previously classified as “highly familiar” or
“moderately familiar” in a prior norming study. High-confidence identification of
tunes as familiar occurred after six notes (on average) for the “highly familiar”
tunes and about eight notes for the “moderately familiar” tunes. Similar results
were obtained in a second experiment in which tune identifications were based on
singing continuations with accuracy and high confidence on three successive trials.
These analyses were based only on tunes that were, eventually, successfully recog-
nized (Experiment 1) or sung (Experiment 2), and so the findings suggest that even
when tunes are known by a listener, they can be identified more quickly if they are
more “familiar.” In light of the preceding discussion, it is important to learn if this
“familiarity” effect is one of nameability or merely real-life exposure. It also is
important to know whether a tune that sounds familiar and yet cannot be named can
nonetheless be uniquely identified through singing its melody. In the Billy Joel
song, “The Piano Man,” the denizens of a bar sing out an old song for which they
cannot recall either title or lyrics (due perhaps to their level of intoxication), raising
the hypothesis that nonverbal identification (through singing) and verbal identifica-
tion (through naming) might be dissociable.
8.2.2 Short-Term Memory
Another popular paradigm for studying melodic processing is the short-term same–
different task in which two short melodies are presented in succession, with the
second (comparison) matching or mismatching the first (standard) in some desig-
nated way. If the melodies are short – say, five to seven notes long – and the task is
simply to judge whether the two melodies are physically identical, as opposed to
having one or two notes changed, performance will be near the ceiling. However,
the task is more difficult if the melodies are longer, or if they are presented at
extremely fast or slow tempos. Another difficulty ensues if the two melodies of a
pair begin on different notes and the task is to judge whether, despite the change in
absolute pitch levels, the second is an accurate transposition of the first into a
different key. This transposition detection task requires the processing of pitch
interval information, as opposed to absolute pitch information, as only the former
remains constant when a tune is transposed.
When the same–different task is made difficult in any one of the aforementioned
ways, prior knowledge of melodies has very large effects. In one recent study,
Dowling et al. (2008) asked their listeners to compare well-known and novel
melodies 11–21 notes in length in a short-term same–different task, presenting the
melodies at extremely fast, medium, or extremely slow tempos (0.6, 3.0, and
6.0 notes/s, respectively). To make the task even more challenging, the different
trials involved changes in only two notes. The largest effect in the study was that of
prior knowledge, with area-under-ROC scores averaging 0.85 and 0.63 for the

2418 Memory for Melodies
well-known and novel tunes, respectively. The knowledge by tempo interaction was
reliable as well, reflecting the fact that, although an advantage for well-known tunes
was everywhere apparent, it was stronger at the medium tempo (which was approx-
imately the familiar tempo for the tune) than at the fast and slow tempos. This was
a surprising result, as the intuitive prediction was that fast or slow presentation
would produce the greatest difficulty with unfamiliar tunes. However, the result
should be viewed in the context of prior evidence that identification of well-known
tunes is impaired at fast and slow tempos (Warren et al. 1991; Andrews et al. 1998).
Thus, if the advantage of well-known tunes results from the fact that they are nameable,
it makes sense that fast and slow presentations, which reduce nameability, should
reduce the advantage.
Strong effects of prior knowledge in short-term memory have also been
found in transposition detection (see Dowling 1982 and Dowling and Harwood
1986 for reviews). This task is a good test of pitch-interval processing, as that
information is the same no matter what the starting note is (“Happy Birthday”
is the same melody with the same pitch intervals regardless of what pitch
someone begins with). If the standard and comparison melodies both are novel
and also share melodic contour (the sequence of ups and downs in pitch), the
task is quite hard, even for persons with musical training (though more musical
participants do perform somewhat better). Indeed, if the standard and comparison
are in the same or closely related keys, discrimination of exact from inexact
transpositions is close to chance (Bartlett and Dowling 1980). With well-
known melodies, however, the task is quite trivial, with even musically
untrained participants performing near ceiling. For example, if the standard
melody is from a well-known tune (e.g., the first phrase of “She’ll Be Coming
Around the Mountain”), and the comparison is a transposed version with one
note changed, participants almost always detect the difference: the comparison
is perceived as simply not the same song. This is notable in light of work sug-
gesting that monkeys will accept a transposed tune as the same as an original
only if the notes have been changed by exactly an octave (Wright et al.
2000).
What does the effect of prior knowledge on transposition detection tell us
about melodic processing? Since the transposition detection task poses a minimal
load on short-term memory (again, as long as the melodies are short) the clearest
implication concerns the process of perceptually encoding the precise melodic
intervals that – along with rhythm, meter (for instance a 2-beat march versus a
3-beat waltz) and a few other factors – distinguish one song from another in our
culture. Such encoding is apparently quite difficult the first few times a novel
melody is heard, and yet it is eventually accomplished for all the tunes that people
know well. Deutsch (1979) has shown that transposition detection with novel
tunes improves if the first tune in each pair is presented six times as opposed to
only once. Beyond this, however, almost nothing is known about the time course
of pitch interval encoding as a tune progresses from being completely novel to
being very well known.

242 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
In fact, researchers do not even know how to characterize the codes that capture
pitch-interval information at different levels of learning and musical expertise.
In some cases, interval information might consist of something akin to the ratios
of frequencies between successive notes (inter-note interval information). In other
cases, however, interval information might be encoded in terms of steps on the
diatonic scale (this is the do-re-mi scale that many learn in childhood). Diatonic
scale-step information is referred to as chroma information and is contrasted with
“pitch height” information in the literature. Thus, when the note C is played in
different octaves, pitch height changes but chroma remains constant (Shepard and
Jordan 1984; Dowling and Harwood 1986; Dowling et al. 1995). Chroma encod-
ing is used in recognition of well-known tunes (see Dowling 1991 for a review).
For example, well-known tunes can be recognized when the pitches of individual
notes have been manipulated by transposing them up or down by one octave,
maintaining chroma while drastically altering pitch height (Idson and Massaro
1978). However, good recognition of such octave-manipulated melodies depends
on their maintaining correct melodic contour, which means that the code used to
recognize such melodies is more than simply a sequence of chromas. Specifically,
the code must contain some information about inter-note pitch intervals, though
this information might be global and not very precise (e.g., it might be melodic
contour, the sequence of rises and falls in pitch height). Along similar lines, the
transposition detection study by Deutsch (1979) included a condition in which the
successive notes of the standard melody were placed in different octaves across six
presentations. Surprisingly, performance in this octave-scrambled condition was
actually worse than in the single-presentation (and unscrambled) condition, and
substantially worse than in the unscrambled six-presentation condition. This finding
suggests it is difficult to learn the pitch-interval structure of novel melodies
through the encoding of chromas alone. However, encoding of melodies based on
chroma and contour appears to provide a viable account of the data in hand
(Dowling 1991).
In summary, people seem to remember some aspects of melodies reasonably
well over the short term. As mentioned previously, simple same–different judg-
ments to pairs of novel melodies of five to seven notes are made with high accuracy
when transposition detection is not required, suggesting highly accurate short-term
memory for several different pitches. Second, whereas transposition detection with
novel melodies is highly error-prone, it can be greatly improved if the “different”
trials involve changes in contour (e.g., if the third interval is rising in the first
melody and falling in the next), suggesting that a general up and down pitch pattern
is encoded easily (at least if the pattern is relatively simple; see Boltz et al. 1985).
Finally, participants appear to be highly sensitive to whether changed notes in the
second melody violate the key of the first (Dowling 1978; Bartlett and Dowling
1980), again suggesting that a general sense of scale is encoded fairly well after a
short exposure. Thus, it is not that novel melodies are generally hard to encode.
Rather, it is the precise pitch interval information in novel melodies that is a source
of difficulty. How this difficulty can be overcome – as certainly it is when a tune is
well learned – is an important unknown.

2438 Memory for Melodies
8.3 Short-Term Versus Long-Term Memory
After reading Sect. 8.2, the reader may be struck by the very different nature of the
questions and methods involved in studies of knowledge effects in short-term
memory versus long-term memory. Indeed, little attention has been paid to the
short-term-memory/long-term-memory distinction by music cognition research-
ers. This is unfortunate, as there are indications that the information retained about
melodies might be quite different in the two kinds of tasks. The role of contour
information, in particular, appears to be different, as suggested by studies by and
DeWitt and Crowder (1986) and Dowling and Bartlett (1981). These investigations
showed that whereas melodic contour is a salient property of tunes in conditions of
immediate testing, even brief filled intervals between a standard melody and a com-
parison melody greatly reduce its importance. Specifically, if a musically filled
interval of even just a few seconds separates a standard tune from a same-contour
comparison, listeners have difficulty detecting that their contours match. In line
with this observation, the Idson and Massaro (1978) study using scrambled melo-
dies found poor identification of well-known tunes if their chromas were altered,
even if their contours were retained. Hence, while contour information can contrib-
ute to tune recognition when note chromas are preserved (a point made earlier),
contour by itself is a weak cue for recognition in long-term memory tasks.
Although melodic contour appears less important in long-term memory than in
short-term memory, this conclusion may depend on defining contour narrowly in
the traditional way, as the sequence of ups and downs in pitch within a melodic
phrase. Jones et al. (1987) have argued for a broader view of contour which they
term “dynamic shape.” Dynamic shape includes rhythmic information as well as
melodic ups and downs, and reflects those points in a melody that are attentionally
more salient. In support of this view, Jones et al. showed that if a set of study tunes
differ in rhythm, lures that match targets in both contour and rhythm attract sub-
stantial numbers of false alarm errors. Further, they obtained this result in a long-
term memory task across three different levels of initial learning. A subsequent
study expanded this result to more familiar melodies (Jones and Ralston 1991).
Whereas melodic contour (as traditionally defined) appears less important in
long-term memory than short-term memory, the reverse may be true for interval
information. Using a variant of the short-term same–different task, Dowling et al.
(2002; see also Dowling et al. 1995) found that discrimination between target melo-
dies and same-contour lures actually improved over a musically filled interval of
5–15 s. By contrast, discrimination between targets and different-contour lures
remained roughly constant. This result may suggest that pitch-interval information
needs time for consolidation in memory (see, e.g., Patel 2008). Another possibility
is that listeners use different codes for interval information in short-term memory
versus long-term memory. Note that contour information can be extracted from
a sequence of actual inter-note intervals that maintain exact pitches, but not from a
sequence of chromas. Hence, if listeners use inter-note interval codes to maintain
melodic information in short-term memory tasks, this could explain why they are
highly sensitive to contour in these tasks.

244 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
Apart from these interpretive issues, an important implication of the Dowling
et al. (2002) study is that the classic short-term same-different task requiring
transposition detection may underestimate the encoding of interval information
into long-term memory. Testing after filled delays may be required to assess the
extent of such encoding. Of course, contour and interval are only two types of
information that might change in importance, function, and/or representational
format between short-term melodic memory and long-term melodic memory.
Hébert and Peretz (1997) compared recognition of well-known tunes when pitch
interval information had been removed by playing all notes at the same pitch, and
when rhythmic information had been changed by playing all notes for the same
duration. Performance was much better in the latter condition, suggesting that
interval information is more important than rhythm for tune recognition in long-
term memory. Given the difficulty that listeners have in the initial encoding of
pitch interval information (as revealed in transposition detection tasks), it is not
at all clear that the analogous conclusion would hold in immediate short-term
memory. Rhythm is also maintained over the long term to some extent, as shown
by the fact that performance was best when both types of information were avail-
able in the Hébert and Peretz (1997) study. Schulkind (1999) showed that many
rhythmic manipulations diminished long-term recognition performance. In light
of recent evidence that long-term memory representations contain information
about “absolute” musical properties such as pitch and tempo (Halpern 1988,
1989; Levitin 1994; Levitin and Cook 1996; Schellenberg and Trehub, 2003), it is
important to compare the roles of such properties in short-term and long-term
memory tasks.
8.4 Tune Structure
People remember better items that make sense to them. Tunes can “make sense”
(or not) in two major ways. The first way is adherence to tonality. Most music that
most people listen to is tonal: Notes and implied or realized harmony conform to a
diatonic (musically logical) scale structure. In other words, in most melodies, most
notes stay inside in the key of the piece. Sometimes composers violate tonality for
aesthetic reasons, such as was true in the 12-tone movement, but not many listeners
find that genre appealing. Listeners seem to prefer melodies the more closely they
conform to a tonal structure (Cross et al. 1983). This scale structure also facilitates
musical processing, as notes are not processed one by one, but as part of a hierarchy
of tonal relationships (Dowling 1978).
The second way that tunes can make sense to listeners is if they conform not to
just any tonal system, but to the listeners’ tonal system. In other words, cultural
familiarity with a tonal system may facilitate initial processing and thus retention.
This second point is different from the first because atonal materials conform to no
system, implying that continued exposure to atonal music would not significantly
improve processing to such sequences. In contrast, cultural familiarity is assumed

2458 Memory for Melodies
to be an entirely environmental effect, as seen by cross-cultural and some develop-
mental evidence.
The effects of tonality on melody recognition have been studied by several
researchers. The typical format for studies varying tonality is short-term transposi-
tion detection, one of the tasks described earlier. A common finding is that tonal
sequences yield more successful retention over a brief period. For instance, Cuddy
and Lyons (1981) presented a standard melody followed by a correct and an incor-
rect transposition in which one note (and thus two intervals) were changed.
Listeners were best able to distinguish these for highly tonal melodies, and were
less adept for sequences with ambiguous tonalities. Halpern et al. (1995) compared
tonal to atonal sequences in a similar paradigm, although only one comparison was
presented at a time. Recognition performance was higher for tonal than for atonal
sequences, regardless of whether the tonality manipulation was between or within
subjects. Using slightly longer delays in a continuous running memory paradigm
(for every melody, say whether it is old or new; some melodies are repeated in the
list), Dowling et al. (1995) also found tonal sequences were superior to atonal, but
only in the more challenging versions of the task where the delays were filled with
other melodies.
On closer inspection, it turns out that the beneficial effects of tonal melodies are not
uniform across variations in the task. In the Cuddy and Lyons (1981) study, the changed
note in the different comparison sequence did not change the contour of the melody; in
the other two studies, new notes (and thus intervals) that changed the contour were
compared to note changes that did not change the contour. These latter two studies
showed that tonality and type of discrimination interacted: tonality made a difference
only when contour was preserved so that the sizes of intervals (as opposed to the direc-
tions of intervals) needed to be detected. Performance on changed-contour sequences
was not sensitive to tonality. This pattern suggests that the processing benefit of well-
formed melodies remembered over short time intervals may be particularly marked
when listeners are discriminating fine pitch interval changes rather than coarse contour
features of melodies.
Another interesting commonality between the Cuddy and Lyons (1981) study
and that by Halpern et al. (1995) is that both tested participants with varying levels
of musical training. No interactions of tonality and training were observed. This
suggests that nonmusicians have abstracted the orderliness of the tonal system, and
use it to increase processing fluency in these discrimination tasks. Recent evidence
suggests that some aspects of tonality are processed preattentively even by nonmu-
sicians. Brattico et al. (2006) found that nonmusicians show a robust early negative
Event-Related Potential (ERP) response to tunes containing an out-of-key note,
even when they were not paying attention to the tunes.
It would be useful to know if tonality confers benefits in retention of melodies
over longer time intervals than are typically tested in the laboratory, given that the
music that most people eventually learn and retain is highly tonal. No doubt such a
task would be aversive to listeners, and perhaps many would predict that tonal items
would yield superior memory. But the finding is hardly a foregone conclusion, as
false-alarm rates might be higher for new melodies that are tonal versus those that

246 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
are atonal, a result that would suggest that if a melody matches well with diatonic
scale structure, it feels more familiar (viz. Sect. 8.2). In addition, tonality effects
might differ depending on whether tonality is varied between subjects or within
subjects. Exposure to a pure list of atonal or weakly tonal items might encourage
list-specific strategies, for instance, a note-by-note encoding strategy, because
higher-order strategies such as chroma encoding would be ineffective with atonal
melodies.
The other kind of musical structure is familiarity with a musical system, defined
either as broadly cultural (Chinese versus Western scales) or as a specific idiom
(classical or jazz). It seems reasonable that people would use the schemata of their
“native” musical tongue to facilitate memory, but few studies have looked at this.
Gardiner and Radomski (1999) presented Polish and English listeners with a list of
single-line melodies from familiar folk songs from each culture. In immediate
recognition, Polish and English listeners were better at discriminating old from new
tunes in their own versus the other culture, but only for old responses that were
definitely “remembered” (listeners had a clear recollective experience) versus
“known” (listeners could say only that they knew the item to be old, but without
any clear memory of having heard it). In terms of dual-process theories of human
recognition memory, the finding may indicate that if melodies fit well with the
musical idiom that a listener has internalized, this improves those processes under-
lying recollection, but not those that support familiarity.
The familiar music in Gardiner and Radomski’s (1999) study was familiar both
culturally and also because the melodies were well known. Demorest et al. (2008)
tried to isolate cultural familiarity by using fully realized but unfamiliar music in a
cross-cultural study. They recruited listeners in the United States and Turkey. Both
groups were presented short lists of excerpts of unfamiliar classical music from
Western and Turkish musical traditions, followed by a recognition test. The styles
were blocked, and foils were carefully matched to targets in musical aspects.
Another test used classical Chinese music. The three musical cultures use different
scale systems. US and Turkish listeners were presumed to be unfamiliar with
Chinese musical systems, although the Turkish listeners were somewhat familiar
with Western music. The authors found a crossover interaction whereby listeners
remembered excerpts from their own culture (US or Turkish) better those from the
other culture. Chinese music was recognized poorly by both groups. Turkish listen-
ers did perform better on Western compared to Chinese melodies, consistent with
their exposure to Western music (US listeners were equally poor on the nonnative
tunes). Musical training did not moderate any of these effects.
Lynch and Eilers (1992) also varied the familiarity of the musical context to look
at its effect on detection of mistunings. Although a perception rather than a memory
test, they confirmed that adult nonmusicians could detect mistunings quite well in
a familiar major scale context, and performed equally poorly on melodies using a
novel scale pattern based on augmented intervals and on melodies using an unfa-
miliar Javanese scale. Interestingly, 1-year-olds showed a pattern similar to that
of adults, whereas 6-month-olds performed equally on the major and augmented
melodies (and were worse on the Javanese). The authors suggest that musical

2478 Memory for Melodies
acculturation can proceed quickly between 1 and 12 months, but it is clear that
some acculturation is in place by 6 months given the poor performance for the
Javanese melodies in all age groups.
In summary, it seems that exposure to a body of music that conforms to a
particular scale system or style engenders schematic knowledge of the underlying
structure of the music. This knowledge can be used to assist encoding of tonal and
culturally familiar music, yielding a memory superiority. It is remarkable that only
incidental exposure is necessary for these effects to emerge, as the familiarity of the
musical system does not seem to interact with musical experience; indeed the
Lynch and Eilers (1992) study showed that 1-year-old infants show this schematic
knowledge. Nearly universally, musical exposure is widespread, from infant-
directed singing to communal activities such as religious services and school
assemblies, to the nearly ubiquitous use of electronic musical playback devices
among young people in contemporary developed societies. This last point leads to
a consideration of what additional benefits in remembering music are associated
with deliberate musical training.
8.5 Musical Experience
It is a common, and not unfounded, belief that experts should remember material
in their domain better than nonexperts. Indeed, some classic studies have shown
that as long as the material is well structured, experts exceed nonexperts in domain-
specific memory in such varied domains as chess (Chase and Simon 1973) and
figure skating (Deakin and Allard 1991). It turns out that although musical experts
exceed nonexperts in some aspects of remembering music, frequently this outcome
does not occur.
First, a methodological note: Different studies define musical expertise differently.
In some countries, national music competency exams allow a uniform classification
scheme. However, other countries such as the United States do not have national
exams. Frequently, researchers use years of musical experience (often further
defined as music lessons) as the metric for musicianship. This is typically instanti-
ated in forming a group of musicians and one of nonmusicians, but sometimes years
of training is used as a covariate. Rarely do researchers actually give musical com-
petency tests before an experiment, allowing years of music lessons (experience) to
serve as a proxy for accomplishment (expertise). In some situations, performing
experience is counted in lieu of lessons, for instance for jazz musicians, some of
whom are largely self taught. Finally, it is standard practice to exclude possessors
of absolute pitch, unless that is the topic of interest.
Surprisingly few studies have examined old–new recognition as a function of
experience, defined in any way. Two studies mentioned earlier are relevant here.
McAuley et al. (2004) presented familiar tunes one or three times, on two successive
days, and then asked musicians and nonmusicians for frequency and recency
judgments. They found that musicians did not outperform nonmusicians in any

248 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
condition. Korenman and Peynircioğlu (2004) failed to find experience effects on
either memory or metamemory judgments for musical recognition. As one recent
exception to the general findings, Mungan et al. (submitted) presented 24 familiar
tunes to trained and untrained listeners, followed by old–new recognition. This was
a particularly large sample of 48 people per group, and thus may have been particu-
larly sensitive, but the musicians were superior to nonmusicians in this task. Their
advantage occurred not in the hit rate, but in a lower false alarm rate than that of
the nonmusicians.
A few studies have embedded this basic task within a more complicated
design. For instance, Halpern et al. (1995, Experiment 2) presented 24 unfamiliar
melodies, each four times in three different keys, for ratings on pleasantness.
Thereafter, old and new items were presented in a short-term same–different task
(described later), but participants were asked at that point to indicate old–new
recognition for each item as well. Musicians and nonmusicians were both young
adult and senior citizens. No effects of musical experience on recognition memory
emerged, once vocabulary score was entered as a covariate. In a similar vein,
Halpern and Müllensiefen (2008, Experiment 2) presented 40 unfamiliar melodies
for later recognition from among 40 new items. This sample had a range of musical
experience background, but no effect of years of training as a covariate emerged.
In a study previously mentioned, Demorest et al. (2008) found no differences
between musicians and nonmusicians on recognition memory of culturally familiar
versus unfamiliar songs.
Experience differences are more commonly tested, and found, in short-term
musical recognition judgments. As one example, Mikumo (1992) presented tonal
or atonal standards to listeners, followed by 12 s of various interference conditions,
and a target that could differ from the standard by being an exact transposition, a
change of one note in the comparison (but preserving contour), a change of two
notes to violate contour, or the comparison was a completely different melody.
Musicians outperformed nonmusicians overall, but particularly in the transposi-
tion condition, where nonmusicians made many false alarms. Radvansky et al.
(1995) presented tonal but unfamiliar tunes as standards, followed by 30 s of a
working memory task, then a target that was melodically similar or not to the
standard. Half the items also changed timbre. Musicians outperformed nonmusi-
cians in identifying the melodically similar target (timbre change did not affect
either group).
In a somewhat more elaborate version of short-term recognition, Halpern
et al. (1995) presented standards that were transposed to three keys (for a total of
four presentations), followed by a 6-s silent interval, and then a target that was yet
another exact transposition, or that changed two of the seven notes. Sometimes
the two new notes changed the contour and sometimes they did not. In addition,
sequences could be tonal or atonal. The task was to discriminate exact transposi-
tions (same) from inexact (different) ones. In several experiments, musicians were
superior to nonmusicians, but only in the condition wherein contour was left
unchanged so that changes in exact intervals needed to be monitored. Musical
experience was not an advantage when a change of contour was the cue to a different

2498 Memory for Melodies
trial. Musicians were not differentially superior to nonmusicians on tonal or
atonal materials.
Another example of short-term recognition was seen in the previously described
study by Dowling et al. (2008), which presented pairs of familiar or unfamiliar
tunes for comparison at very slow, medium (normal), or very fast tempos. Same
trials were exact repetitions and different trials changed two notes with a preserved
contour. Musicians were superior to nonmusicians in all conditions in discriminat-
ing exact from changed repetitions, including in the easiest condition of comparing
two familiar songs at normal speed. This result concurs with the previously men-
tioned study of tune identification by Dalla Bella et al. (2003), who found that
musicians identified well-known and moderately familiar melodies in fewer notes
than did nonmusicians, suggesting that training might increase the efficiency of
tune identification as a general rule, and not specific to challenging conditions.
To sum up, these studies all suggest that the primary advantage of musical train-
ing in remembering melodies occurs when the task requires participants to make
fine musically relevant distinctions such as those of interval size, as might occur
during a piece when a composer presents variations of a theme. Nonmusicians are quite
capable of detecting contour change, which one could argue does not involve such
fine musical discrimination as transposition detection. Skills in making fine musi-
cally relevant distinctions among melodies are typically tested over short retention
intervals and thus within a span of working or short-term memory. Hence, it is
unknown whether musical training would confer an advantage in making these
same distinctions in long-term episodic memory tasks. The literature seems to show
that nonmusicians are as capable as musicians in tests of long-term episodic memory
for tunes, but these tasks have typically used simplified materials and have not
required the types of subtle musically relevant discriminations required in the short-
term memory studies where tunes are presented in quick succession. That musi-
cians appear to be better at identification of tunes known from life requires more
research attention, but it may suggest that certain fine discriminations (of precise
musical intervals, for example) can facilitate discrimination of such tunes from
unknown tunes.
8.6 Aging
One of the issues that has interested the current authors for some time is how music
cognition, including memory, changes in normal and pathological aging. This interest
stems from both everyday and theoretical bases. It is evident that many older people
enjoy music of many genres, as listeners, performers, and financial patrons. In fact,
performing arts personnel refer to a “Q-tip Effect” at concerts of jazz, Big Band, or
classical music, describing the view from the stage when the spotlights shine through
the gray-haired audience. Community bands and orchestras often count senior citizens
among their most avid participants, and many retirement communities and nursing
homes offer musical activities as part of enrichment and therapy.

250 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
Yet very little research has been conducted on this topic. This dearth is regrettable
because of some interesting if not unique perspectives that using music as a domain
can bring to the study of cognitive aging. For instance, music without words is
completely nonverbal yet conveys messages such as valence and arousal (Lucas
et al. 2010), making a useful contrast with the large majority of studies in cognitive
aging that use language to convey messages. Except for musicians practicing for a
concert, most music is learned incidentally, allowing researchers to examine how
both particular pieces of music, and the underlying musical structures, may be
learned by mere exposure over the lifetime. In addition, musical training can vary
at any age, making it possible to separate effects of years of exposure and deliberate
training. That is hard to do in most other domains. Finally, one can examine
whether music memory is more preserved in pathological aging, such as Alzheimer’s
disease, compared to well-known verbal impairments.
In most studies of cognitive aging, older adults are defined as 60+ years. In some
studies, age is grouped into two or three levels. At other times, age can be used as
a continuous variable for somewhat more statistical power. When possible,
researchers administer at least one cognitive test not related to music, such as a
vocabulary test, to help ensure that any age-related impairments are not attributable
to general cognitive decline. This section mostly concerns explicit memory for
newly learned material in normally aging adults, where the rememberer is aware
that he or she is engaging in an attempt to remember the material, but touches on
some other forms of memory and pathological aging as well.
The first point to consider is semantic memory for music, or general memories
about music not tied to a specific learning experience. Do older adults remember
music learned as younger adults? Several studies agree that familiar music, once
firmly encoded, seems retrievable decades later. As noted earlier, Bartlett et al.
(1995) presented familiar and novel songs in a recognition task to young adults,
normal older adults, and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients. As part of verifying the
stimuli, all groups were asked at the end of the experiment to classify the tunes as
familiar or unfamiliar, and to name each one or at least give a descriptor or a few
lyrics from the song. The familiar songs were selected to be “lowest common
denominator” songs that most Americans would likely learn in childhood, such as
patriotic and folk songs. The young and older adults were nearly perfect in classifying
the songs, and also scored highly in naming or describing these songs. In fact, this
kind of memory seems very robust, as the AD group was very adept in the classifi-
cation task (they had more problems naming the songs, which is consistent with
naming deficits in AD). All three groups were perfect in calling well-known songs
“familiar,” and they showed a low false alarm rate (occasionally a novel tune was
called familiar; the novel tunes were in fact permutations of the familiar tunes, so
the occasional false alarm should not be surprising.)
A few other studies have shown that memory for popular music that is first
learned in youth seems particularly robust to aging. Bartlett and Snelus (1981)
presented middle-aged and older listeners with music popular from various decades
for a familiarity and time-last-heard judgment, and lyric recall for tunes deemed
familiar. Of course, they could not guarantee that listeners had been exposed to all

2518 Memory for Melodies
the tunes, but the older listeners had a higher proportion of “familiar” judgments
than the middle-aged adults, for music popular when the former group were young
adults but the latter group were children or not yet born. This early-learned advan-
tage was confirmed by Rubin et al. (1998) and also Schulkind et al. (1999), who
showed that these songs elicit high emotionality ratings, which could partially
explain the memory advantage.
The retention of familiar music over decades may depend on the extent to which
the music was the focus of attention during early exposure. Maylor (1991) found
that older adults were worse than middle-aged adults in recognizing television
themes no matter what the retention interval (i.e., era of learning). However, it
could be the case that this kind of incidental music has less musical and emotive
meaning than music learned among peers as a young adult, or in settings such as
summer camp or as part of religious services. It is possible that older adults have a
particular disadvantage in the very casual learning situations of hearing background
music to a television show.
Overall, research seems consistent with everyday observations that older adults
can store representations of music for decades, but does this memory ability extend
to newly learned music? As noted earlier, there is some folk belief that memory for
music may be somewhat protected from the usual age-related impairments in
episodic memory. However, it seems that at least in episodic memory over the long
term, aging is associated with the kinds of impairments that are seen in other
domains. Again, research is sparse but there are a few such studies.
Two relevant studies were already described in the context of experience and
tune-knowledge effects. One was the Halpern et al. (1995, Experiment 2) study,
which presented 24 unfamiliar melodies, each four times in three different keys,
for ratings on pleasantness. In a subsequent old–new recognition test, musical
experience did not affect performance (the point made earlier), but young adults
were significantly (but not drastically) better than older adults. In the second
relevant study, Bartlett et al. (1995) presented well-known and novel tunes (the
latter permutations of the well-known tunes) for old–new recognition. In
Experiment 2, the tunes were presented blocked by knowledge (i.e., only well-
known tunes in one study list and test, only novel tunes in another), whereas in
Experiment 3, well-known and novel tunes were mixed in each study list and test.
Young adults performed better than older adults in both of the experiments
particularly because older adults had large false alarm rates to familiar tunes. The
size of the age difference was stronger in the mixed condition in which both the
young and old began having trouble suppressing false alarms to new but well-
known items (a problem attributed to familiarity in the absence of naming).
Blanchet et al. (2006) found that older adults had hit rates equivalent to younger
adults when asked to memorize a short set of unfamiliar tunes for later recogni-
tion, but had trouble suppressing false alarms. An encoding task (classifying the
tunes as march or a waltz) actually hurt older people’s performance. The authors
suggested that the task did not provide enough distinctive cues but served instead
as a divided attention task, consistent with the earlier point about the lack of
distinctiveness in memory encoding.

252 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
From the small amount of evidence available, it seems that retention of a set of
items for recognition later in the experimental session is subject to the same
age-related decline as seen in many other domains (Park and Schwarz 2000).
However, short-term retention in same–different tests does not always show an
age-related deficit. Meinz (2000) presented musical notation in a variety of short-
term memory tasks, both recall and recognition, to musically literate people of
various ages. She found age-related deficits in only a few memory tasks, and no
age-related impairment in her composite memory score. Halpern et al. (1995)
found that older adults were less adept than younger adults in differentiating exact
transpositions from different-contour transpositions. But it was this study that
found age invariance when the task was to differentiate exact transpositions from
changed-interval transpositions. So the age-related deficit here seemed more tied
to the more global task of contour processing, not the detailed task of interval
detection. All listeners performed the contour task much more accurately than the
interval task, belying another folk belief that age-related impairments are always
larger in harder tasks.
Only small deficits due to aging were found in another type of short-term
comparison task (Dowling et al. 2008). This was task mentioned earlier of compar-
ing familiar or unfamiliar standards with an exact repetition or a changed-interval
target, at slow, medium, or fast speeds. Whereas results showed a large effect of
experience, only a modest effect of age occurred, even for tunes going very fast or
very slow. This is surprising because one reasonable hypothesis was that older
adults might have trouble integrating a very fast stream of notes due to attentional
problems, or remembering a very slow stream of notes due to working memory
limitations. But these near side-by-side comparisons do not task the more deliberate
encoding used in list learning experiments and where deficits are the hallmark of
cognitive aging.
One aspect of memory not so far addressed is implicit testing. Most of the studies
presented so far involve explicit testing, usually recognition. Implicit tests involve
a change in behavior without the testee necessarily experiencing a conscious
memory act. And in fact, in real life people often retrieve music without necessarily
having a memory retrieval experience. For instance, a person may hum along with
a song on the radio without being able to recall the tune by name, or find that she
or he likes a tune for some reason, only later realizing it had been heard previously.
A friend told an anecdote of suddenly feeling sad while a certain hymn was being
sung at her church. Only later did she remember that the tune had been sung at her
mother’s funeral.
A few studies have found that music can be tested implicitly. Warker and
Halpern (2005) adapted a stem completion task to music: a list of unfamiliar tunes
was presented, followed by the first few notes (stems) of old or new tunes. People
were asked to hum a note that “sounded good” after the stem. They sang the correct
note more often for old than new tunes, independent of explicit memory for that
note. Peretz et al. (1998) found dissociations of recognition memory for music
(explicit) from increases in liking for old tunes (mere exposure effect, implicit).

2538 Memory for Melodies
A common finding in cognitive aging is that implicit testing often reveals
smaller aging effects than explicit testing (Fleischman et al. 2004), possibly due to
more automatic nature of the encoding and/or retrieval processes used in implicit
tests compared to explicit. Is this result also shown in studies with music? Gaudreau
and Peretz (1999), and Halpern and O’Connor (2000), showed that recognition
memory was quite impaired in older versus younger adults, but age made no differ-
ence in the implicit task of an affective judgment to each tune. Thus it may be the
case that effortful retrieval is a locus of age-related effects than encoding, as the
tunes had to be encoded to be rated as more pleasant or better liked. On the other
hand, it might be argued that elaborative encoding at the time of study is important
for explicit-test performance but not for implicit-test performance, and that older
persons are deficient at such encoding. However, it was argued earlier that elabora-
tive encoding strategies seem largely ineffective in changing music recognition
performance, and thus is evidence against this view.
The final question raised in this section is whether the deleterious effects of
normal aging and the beneficial effects of experience can offset one another. That
is, are there any situations in which age and experience interact? It turns out that
this is a perhaps desired but not-often-found pattern in various domains. For
instance, Morrow et al. (1994) failed to find this for airline pilots, except for one or
two specific tasks. Meinz (2000) did not find age by experience interactions in her
notation memory studies. A review of work from the research program of the
current authors (Halpern and Bartlett 2002) examined 13 experiments that could
have revealed such a compensatory pattern. In only one instance did such a pattern
obtain, and even there, the interaction accounted for very little variance. In fact, that
review concluded that age and experience typically affected different tasks and that
the benefit of younger age and more experience are not interchangeable.
The opposite side of this coin is that nothing suggests that age diminishes the
positive effect of experience. In fact, Meinz (2000) found that because experience
usually increases with age, this “confound” can lead to an apparent diminution of
age effects with experience. So even though this is not an interaction in the theoretical
sense, in a practical sense, older musicians would be expected to exceed younger
nonmusicians, in experience-sensitive tasks.
8.7 Conclusions and New Directions
Perhaps the major message of this chapter is that memory for melodies depends
upon knowledge. First, it depends on knowledge of individual tunes, their perceived
familiarity and nameability. Second, it depends on knowledge of the tonal structure
and well-formedness of tunes, including knowledge of in-key versus out-of-key
notes. Finally, it depends on the musical knowledge of the listener, using the term
rather broadly to include both symbolic knowledge and procedural skills developed
in the course of musical training.

254 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
Knowledge of individual tunes is important in the simple short-term memory
same–different task of judging pairs of tunes as same or different. Performance is
much higher if the first-presented tune in a pair is a well-known melody, and this is
true whether or not the task requires recognition of targets that have been transposed
to different keys, so long as ceiling effects are avoided and accurate same–different
judgments cannot be based on global aspects of the tunes such as melodic contour.
In the domain of long-term memory, tunes that have been rated as highly familiar
are recognized more quickly (i.e., after fewer notes) than those rated as only
moderately familiar, and prior knowledge of tunes is also important for “episodic
memory,” that is, recollecting the contexts in which tunes have been presented.
Recollection of context appears to depend not simply on a tune being familiar to
the listener, but on its nameability; that is, its unique identifiability with a proper
name, word, or phrase. It is unknown whether familiarity without nameability is
sufficient to produce (1) quicker identification of tunes and (2) high performance in
short-term same–different tasks, including those requiring accurate encoding of
musical interval information. Regarding the latter point, it is clear that listeners
have rather poor knowledge of the intervals of novel tunes heard only once before,
and yet these same listeners – even if they are musically untrained – have accurate
knowledge of the intervals of tunes they know well. An open question is whether
accurate knowledge of the intervals of well-known tunes can be developed with
tunes that have been heard repeatedly without ever being linked to names or other
verbalizable information that uniquely identifies them.
It will surprise no one that tunes that conform to familiar tonal structures are
easier to recognize, and indeed they are. However, researchers have only started to
examine what aspects of tonal structure in a given musical culture are important for
learning and remembering of melodies, and how these aspects of tonal structure
themselves are learned. The research covered here suggests that a very basic aspect
of tonal structure – the set of in-key versus out-of-key notes – is implicitly learned
by virtually all listeners, and produces effects of tonal structure on memory.
However, it is unclear whether other aspects of tonal structure might affect melodic
memory at different levels of musical expertise. In light of evidence that nonmusi-
cians show relatively poor differentiation in their ratings of the centrality of different
notes within a key (Krumhansl 1990), and are poor at classifying melodies as major
versus minor (Leaver and Halpern 2004), it is likely that such more subtle aspects
of tonal structure will affect melodic memory only among the more highly experi-
enced or trained. It likewise will surprise no one that more musically trained listeners
show better memory for tunes. However, the research in this area has advanced to
a point quite beyond common knowledge. Certainly, few “people on the street”
would intuit that musicians do not differ from nonmusicians in their sensitivity to a
melody’s out-of-key note, but that musicians are better in making the basic judg-
ment of whether one novel melody is a transposition of one heard a few seconds
before (this task is trivial even for nonmusicians if the first melody is known, but is
more difficult if the first melody is novel).
The ability to group musical materials during encoding may play a role in the
effects of expertise. In chess, for example, it is very well known that experts chunk

2558 Memory for Melodies
together multipiece configurations of chess pieces, enjoying very high memory for
chess-board displays as a consequence (Chase and Simon 1973). Similarly, much
research with faces – with which it is argued all of us are experts – supports this
chunking, or configural, encoding. Moreover, recent evidence suggests similar
forms of configural encoding can emerge with expertise in identification of birds,
automobiles, and invented three-dimensional forms (i.e., “greebles”; see Bukach
et al. 2006). In fact, research summarized by Bukach et al. suggests that two
different types of configural processing – holistic processing of the whole object
and relational processing of spatial relations among features – both are related to
expertise with visual stimuli. Although these two subtypes of configural processing
are separable in terms of brain function (and probably in other ways), they may be
functionally related in that attention to a whole object is likely to facilitate encoding
of spatial relations among its constituent features.
By analogy, attention to the whole of a musical phrase might impair selective
processing of individual notes, but improve the encoding of musical relations
among these notes. Indeed, the Dalla Bella et al. (2003) study cited earlier in this
chapter, as well as research by Schulkind and colleagues (Schulkind 2004;
Schulkind et al. 2003), has shown that the most important notes for identifying
melodies tend to occur at boundaries of musical phrases of five to seven notes. In
another relevant study, Kim and Levitin (2002) replaced the notes of well-known
melodies with bandpass filtered sounds that severely disrupted the absolute and
relative pitch of the individual notes. Melody identification was approximately 75%
when bandpass filtering had reduced identification of individual pitches and
inter-note intervals to almost 0%, a striking example of tune recognition based on
inter-note relations when the notes themselves are not accurately encoded.
Unfortunately, it is not yet clear whether the relational processing supported by
these studies is linked to expertise. Dalla Bella et al. (2003) found that both musicians
and nonmusicians appeared to recognize melodies through processing of phrase-
level units, and Schulkind (2004) found no reliable correlations between musical
training and inter-condition differences that would have suggested a linkage of
phrase-level coding to musical expertise. Finally, Kim and Levitin’s listeners had at
least 10 years of musical training, raising the question of whether untrained indi-
viduals would show similar evidence for relational recognition of melodies – or not.
One of the most encouraging findings pertaining to musical expertise is that its
enhancing effects on melodic processing holds up well in old age. Although age-
related deficits in melodic processing have been found, the melodic processing
advantages linked to music training appear not to decline at all in old age. Moreover,
age-related deficits in melodic processing do not appear to involve the more intrin-
sically musical aspects of melodies such as tonality, key, or chroma. Thus, so far
the evidence is quite well aligned with anecdotal reports of preserved memory for
music among the very old and demented
The effects of expertise have been examined primarily in short-term memory
tasks, and, of all the many gaps in the literature to date, perhaps none is more striking
than the lack of information about expertise effects in long-term melodic memory.
It certainly is possible that such expertise effects are present, and remain largely

256 A.R. Halpern and J.C. Bartlett
unknown simply because they have not been examined. On the other hand, the
processes and representations used in long-term melodic memory may be funda-
mentally different than those used in short-term memory tasks. Kosslyn’s (1980)
influential theory of visual imagery drew a sharp distinction between the “surface
display” underlying the experience of visualizing an object and the “deep represen-
tations” that support long-term retention of visual information (the latter being at
least partly propositional). Research and theory on melodic processing, and on how
musical knowledge affects such processing, should be directed at this question.
Acknowledgments We thank W. Jay Dowling for many helpful suggestions during the prepara-
tion of this chapter and Kay Ocker for help in preparation of the manuscript.
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