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Immediate Recall of Melodies

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Abstract

This chapter presents musical transcriptions of the attempts of eight adult subjects to recall part of a folk melody that was repeatedly presented to them. It also discusses the results of some analyses of these transcripts, which seem to point particularly clearly to the involvement of structural knowledge in musical memory. A different reason for the paucity of empirical work on musical recall is the lack of agreed upon and well-motivated methods of describing and analysing the content of a performance in relationship to an original model. The chapter explores methods of musical analysis that provide information at an analogous level of abstraction. It is worth pointing out that most contemporary research on musical memory has used some form of recognition procedure and has used sequences containing much fewer than thirty notes.

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... The purpose of this study is to model such melodic memory and recall processes in a quantitative way, and to understand how mental representations of melodies develop over short periods of time, after repeated exposure to the same melodic target stimulus. Specifically, we advocate the melodic recall paradigm (Sloboda & Parker, 1985), and in doing so, like Okada and Slevc (2021) and others (Buren et al., 2021;Hallam & Creech, 2010) recently argued, emphasize the importance of musical production tasks to gaining a comprehensive understanding of musical abilities. Furthermore, we take modeling of the melodic recall paradigm forward in two main respects. ...
... First, we reason for and employ algorithmic similarity metrics to score melodic recall data, noting some limitations of previous approaches, and suggest similarity metrics better help us understand melodic recall processes. Second, while Sloboda and Parker (1985) noted that participants gradually attempt to sing more notes across each consecutive attempt at recalling the same melody, they did not formally model such changes across attempts. We contend that not formally modeling the change in attempt length is a fundamental omission in previous melodic recall studies (e.g., Ogawa et al., 1995;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Zielinska & Miklaszewski, 1992). ...
... Second, while Sloboda and Parker (1985) noted that participants gradually attempt to sing more notes across each consecutive attempt at recalling the same melody, they did not formally model such changes across attempts. We contend that not formally modeling the change in attempt length is a fundamental omission in previous melodic recall studies (e.g., Ogawa et al., 1995;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Zielinska & Miklaszewski, 1992). In particular, we suggest that modeling the change in attempt length in parallel to the change in overall performance (as measured by melodic similarity metrics) offers at least three main advantages for melodic recall research. ...
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Using melodic recall paradigm data, we describe an algorithmic approach to assessing melodic learning across multiple attempts. In a first simulation experiment, we reason for using similarity measures to assess melodic recall performance over previously utilized accuracy-based measures. In Experiment 2, with up to six attempts per melody, 31 participants sang back 28 melodies (length 15–48 notes) presented either as a piano sound or a vocal audio excerpt from real pop songs. Our analysis aimed to predict the similarity between the target melody and participants’ sung recalls across successive attempts. Similarity was measured with different algorithmic measures reflecting various structural (e.g., tonality, intervallic) aspects of melodies and overall similarity. However, previous melodic recall research mentioned, but did not model, that the length of the sung recalls tends to increase across attempts, alongside overall performance. Consequently, we modeled how the attempt length changes alongside similarity to meet this omission in the literature. In a mediation analysis, we find that a target melody’s length, but not other melodic features, is the main predictor of similarity via the attempt length. We conclude that sheer length constraints appear to be the main factor when learning melodies long enough to require several attempts to recall. Analytical features of melodic structure may be more important for shorter melodies, or with stimulus sets that are structurally more diverse than those found in the sample of pop songs used in this study.
... The main reason for the relative lack of studies of music production has been due to methodological limitations. Tests of music production are typically more difficult to implement and utilize for meaningful assessments of musical behavior, mainly due to the problem of so-called "dirty (or messy) data" (Müllensiefen & Wiggins, 2011;Silas & Müllensiefen, 2023;Sloboda & Parker, 1985). The primary issue with such data is obtaining useful symbolic representations of sound and music from recorded audio files. ...
... Research which employs singing, recorded as audio, as the main unit of analysis, generally has two separate strands in the research literature. In melodic recall research (Müllensiefen & Wiggins, 2011;Ogawa et al., 1995;Oura & Hatano, 1988;Silas & Müllensiefen, 2023;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Zielinska & Miklaszewski, 1992), singing is used as a test of memory for melodies and can help understand how such memory develops over time. Alternatively, singing accuracy research (Pfordresher et al., 2010;Pfordresher et al., 2015;Russo et al., 2020;Tan et al., 2021) is generally concerned with the ability to sing accurately and how such knowledge can help improve singing education. ...
... In contrast to singing accuracy tests, the melodic recall paradigm was designed as a test of melodic memory, with the most cited early example being Sloboda and Parker (1985). The melodic recall paradigm is used to make inferences about melodic memory, its errors, and how melodic representations build up over time (Müllensiefen & Wiggins, 2011;Silas & Müllensiefen, 2023). ...
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We describe the development of the Singing Ability Assessment (SAA) open-source test environment. The SAA captures and scores different aspects of human singing ability and melodic memory in the context of item response theory. Taking perspectives from both melodic recall and singing accuracy literature, we present results from two online experiments (N = 247; N = 910). On-the-fly audio transcription is produced via a probabilistic algorithm and scored via latent variable approaches. Measures of the ability to sing long notes indicate a three-dimensional principal components analysis solution representing pitch accuracy, pitch volatility and changes in pitch stability (proportion variance explained: 35%; 33%; 32%). For melody singing, a mixed-effects model uses features of melodic structure (e.g., tonality, melody length) to predict overall sung melodic recall performance via a composite score [R2c = .42; R2m = .16]. Additionally, two separate mixed-effects models were constructed to explain performance in singing back melodies in a rhythmic [R2c = .42; R2m = .13] and an arhythmic [R2c = .38; R2m = .11] condition. Results showed that the yielded SAA melodic scores are significantly associated with previously described measures of singing accuracy, the long note singing accuracy measures, demographic variables, and features of participants' hardware setup. Consequently, we release five R packages which facilitate deploying melodic stimuli online and in laboratory contexts, constructing audio production tests, transcribing audio in the R environment, and deploying the test elements and their supporting models. These are published as open-source, easy to access, and flexible to adapt.
... The first problem concerns measuring and interpreting participants' responses in studies of music and memory. Fewer studies have been undertaken of musical recall than recognition (Müllensiefen & Wiggins, 2011), as challenges are presented in recording and interpreting an accurate response from untrained musicians (Sloboda & Parker, 1985). Where test administration involves musical performance at a keyboard, or the interpretation of sung responses from a participant (e.g., Bailes, 2010;Warker & Halpern, 2005), a researcher with skilled musical training is required, further limiting the replicability of studies. ...
... In music, explicit recognition is one of the most commonly used methods for studying memory for musical items, due to the high level of experimental control possible (Sloboda & Parker, 1985). Studies of explicit recognition in music have yielded findings that musical key, timbre, tempo, and rhythmic content affect recognition of a melody (Halpern & Müllensiefen, 2008;Hébert & Peretz, 1997;Schellenberg & Habashi, 2015), that liking improves memory for music (Schellenberg et al., 2008;Stalinski & Schellenberg 2013), and that, as for other domains, distinctive content improves recognition (Bailes, 2010;Müllensiefen & Halpern, 2014;Schacter & Wiseman, 2006). ...
... Recall studies present a particular difficulty for those studying musical memory, as it has proven difficult to measure recall performance in music. Traditional methods have required the participant to use musical notation or to perform their response on a musical instrument (Deutsch, 1980) or by singing (Sloboda & Parker, 1985, Warker & Halpern, 2005. Müllensiefen and Wiggins (2011) discuss in detail the challenges presented when attempting to analyze data from sung responses, which they describe as Bdirty^as a researcher must frequently make subjective judgments as to which note a participant intended to sing. ...
Article
Despite numerous innovative studies, rates of replication in the field of music psychology are extremely low (Frieler et al., 2013). Two key methodological challenges affecting researchers wishing to administer and reproduce studies in music cognition are the difficulty of measuring musical responses, particularly when conducting free-recall studies, and access to a reliable set of novel stimuli unrestricted by copyright or licensing issues. In this article, we propose a solution for these challenges in computer-based administration. We present a computer-based application for testing memory for melodies. Created using the software Max/MSP (Cycling ’74, 2014a), the MUSOS (Music Software System) Toolkit uses a simple modular framework configurable for testing common paradigms such as recall, old–new recognition, and stem completion. The program is accompanied by a stimulus set of 156 novel, copyright-free melodies, in audio and Max/MSP file formats. Two pilot tests were conducted to establish the properties of the accompanying stimulus set that are relevant to music cognition and general memory research. By using this software, a researcher without specialist musical training may administer and accurately measure responses from common paradigms used in the study of memory for music.
... Mental practice alone does not increase performance skill; it only increases memory recall. Physical practice develops performance skill (Sloboda & Parker, 1985). ...
... This defines the implementation of a goal image into physical movements and fine motor skills. Lehmann and Ericsson (1997) suggest that goal imaging and motor production must be "coupled" in order to achieve an expert level of performance (see also Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Woody & Lehmann, 2010). The third and last stage is self-monitoring. ...
... Despite these findings, researchers suggest that melodic content is more susceptible to error (i.e., forgetting over a period of time) than rhythmic content (Drake, Dowling, & Palmer, 1991;Drake & Palmer, 2000;Sloboda & Parker, 1985). Sloboda and Parker (1985) examined the melodic, harmonic, metric, and rhythmic accuracy of four musicians and four non-musicians, ages 19 to 22, while singing a melody. ...
... Sloboda and Parker (1985) proposed a new experimental paradigm for research on melodic memory in which participants are asked to listen to novel melodies and to sing back the parts they can recall from memory. In contrast to the many varieties of melodic recognition paradigms frequently used in memory research this sung recall paradigm can answer questions about how mental representations of a melody build up in memory over time, about the nature of memory errors, and about the interplay between different musical dimensions in memory. ...
... We demonstrate how it can help to make analysis procedures explicit and thus contribute to standardization. We reanalyse the original data from Sloboda and Parker's ( 1985 ) study, to demonstrate where computing technology can be applied and what additional value it can bring to the analysis of data from this very rich paradigm, whose full potential, we argue, has yet to be realized. ...
... The differences between recall studies lie mostly in whether novel or familiar melodies are used as experimental stimuli, in whether participants are musically trained or untrained (or perhaps the study compares performance between these two groups), and in the participants' response mode. It is worth briefly reviewing some recall studies here to provide a feel for the spectrum of existing methods, and to position the specific experimental paradigm of Sloboda and Parker ( 1985 ) therein. ...
Article
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Sloboda and Parker (1985) proposed a new experimental paradigm for research on melodic memory in which participants are asked to listen to novel melodies and to sing back the parts they can recall from memory. In contrast to the many varieties of melodic recognition paradigms frequently used in memory research this sung recall paradigm can answer questions about how mental representations of a melody build up in memory over time, about the nature of memory errors, and about the interplay between different musical dimensions in memory. Although the paradigm has clear advantages with regard to ecological validity, Sloboda and Parker also note a number of difficulties inherent to the paradigm that mostly result from necessity to analyse 'dirty musical data' as sung by mostly untrained participants. This contribution reviews previous research done using the sung recall paradigm and proposes a computational approach for the analysis of dirty melodic data. This approach is applied to data from a new study using Sloboda and Parker's paradigm. This chapter discusses how this new approach not only enables researchers to handle large amounts of data but also make use of concepts from computational music analysis and music information retrieval that introduce a new level of analytic precision and conceptual clarity and thus provide a new interface which connects Sloboda's paradigm to rigorous quantitative data analysis.
... & Steedman, 1971;Povel, 1981;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Thompson, 1993;Tillmann, Bharucha, & Bigand, 2000;Van Dyke Bingham, 1910). For tonal music, this frame of reference consists of a metrical frame that enables the interpretation of the rhythmical aspects and a harmonic frame that allows the interpretation of the melodic/harmonic aspects.The present study focuses on the induction of the harmonic frame and is based on the assumption that a sequence of tones will be perceived as a tonal melody only if the listener succeeds in discovering an acceptable underlying harmony. ...
... This is an interesting observation that indicates that even when perceiving single melodic intervals listeners tend to interpret the tones in a tonal frame by establishing a key. Sloboda and Parker (1985) reported an exploratory study in which eight subjects, four with musical training and four without, provided six successive sung recalls of a fragment of the Russian folksong "Sailor" (comprising 30 notes). After transcription, the reproductions were analyzed in several ways including a melodic contour analysis, a metrical analysis, a rhythmical analysis, a phrase structure analysis, and a harmonic analysis. ...
... Research by Holleran, Jones, and Butler (1995), Platt and Racine (1994), and Thompson and Cuddy (1989) confirm the results of the study by Sloboda and Parker (1985) by providing experimental evidence that listeners make a harmonic analysis if the input consists of a single voice melody. Trehub, Thorpe, and Trainor (1990) reported that infants 7-10 months old can detect small changes to tone patterns based on a V-I chord progression better than changes to patterns not based on such a chord progression, suggesting that even these very young children are sensitive to the underlying harmony (see, however, Trainor & Trehub, 1992). ...
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By common assumption, the first step in processing a tonal melody consists in setting up the appropriate metrical and harmonic frames required for the mental representation of the sequence of tones. Focusing on the generation of a harmonic frame, this study aims (a) to discover the factors that facilitate or interfere with the development of a harmonic interpretation, and (b) to test the hypothesis that goodness ratings of tone sequences largely depend on whether the listener succeeds in creating a suitable harmonic interpretation. In two experiments, listeners rated the melodic goodness of selected sequences of 10 and 13 tones and indicated which individual tones seemed not to fit. Results indicate that goodness ratings (a) are higher the more common the induced harmonic progression, (b) are strongly affected by the occurrence and position of nonchord tones: sequences without nonchord tones were rated highest, sequences with anchoring nonchord tones intermediately, and nonanchoring nonchord tones lowest. The explanation offered is compared with predictions derived from other theories, which leads to the conclusion that when a tone sequence is perceived as a melody, it is represented in terms of its underlying harmony, in which exact pitch-height characteristics play a minor role.
... First, we are concerned with expert singers' memory. Only two studies, by Sloboda and Parker (1985) and Kilgour et al. (2000), have investigated the effect of expertise (defined in terms of levels of musical training) on recall. The remainder involved the participation of non-musically trained adults (Rubin, 1977;Calvert and Tart, 1993;Rainey and Larsen, 2002), musically trained adults included in groups of non-musically trained adults (Wallace, 1994), children (Calvert and Billingsley, 1998), or compared adults' and children's recall (Chazin and Neuschatz, 1990). ...
... Second, we operationalize memory in terms of production: recall that involves singing both the words and melody of the song. Sloboda and Parker (1985) investigated recall for melody only. The other studies referred to above required participants to write down the words only (Rubin, 1977;Chazin and Neuschatz, 1990;Calvert and Tart, 1993, Experiment 2;Wallace, 1994;McElhinney and Annett, 1996;Kilgour et al., 2000) or to recite them (Calvert and Billingsley, 1998). ...
... While it may be harder for children to form new associations between words and melodies, particularly when the words are difficult to understand (Chazin and Neuschatz, 1990) and/or they are set to an unfamiliar melody (Calvert and Billingsley, 1998), it seems to be easier for expert musicians: Kilgour et al. (2000) found that musically trained adults had better recall for sung words than did their nonmusically trained counterparts. This may well result from their superior recall for melodies, as shown in Sloboda and Parker's (1985) study. As predicted by research on expertise generally (e.g. ...
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The nature of the relationship between words and music in memory has been studied in a variety of ways, from investigations of listeners' recall for the words of songs stored in long-term memory to recall for novel information set to unfamiliar melodies. We asked singers to perform an unaccompanied song from memory following deliberate learning and memorization of the words and melody separately and together. Participants with high levels of musical expertise gave more accurate and fluent performances than those with lower levels of musical expertise, but only when they had memorized the words and melody together. While some errors were conjoint, such that erroneous recall of one component - words or melody - affected recall for the other, a higher proportion were separate, such that participants were able to preserve one component when they recalled the other erroneously. Words and melody are thus recalled in association with one another, so that retrieving one enables retrieval of the other, but are not integrated to the extent that failure to recall one accurately invariably results in failure to recall the other. Finally, more hesitations were made at the ends of phrases than at the start or mid-phrase, suggesting that the formal structure of a song provides a framework for recall. In conclusion, memorizing words and melody together is an effective strategy, but perhaps only for singers with high levels of musical expertise. Copyright
... Cependant, il est frappant de trouver des traces récurrentes, ne serait-ce que dans les discours tenus par les tenants d'une pratique ou de l'autre, d'un ensemble évident de liens reliant ces deux approches. 6 Une des principales notions issue de la pratique compositionnelle contemporaine est celle de la segmentation entre en-temps et hors-temps. La problématique de la différence entre hors-temps et en-temps ouvre une discussion intéressante sur la manière d'envisager le fait compositionnel improvisé ou composé. ...
... 15 C'est pourquoi nous préférons utiliser le terme d'éléments musicaux que nous nommerons cristallisés. Un ensemble de facteurs engendre cette cristallisation : l'écoute en est bien évidemment un des principaux 6 . Or, alors même que l'écoute s'effectue dans une inscription temporelle physiquement quantifiable (donc en occultant toute notion de temps psychologique), il est bien connu que la mémoire de ces éléments est inexacte sur le plan temporel 7 . ...
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Les rapports que tissent l’improvisation et la composition sont ambigus. Dans quelle mesure est-il possible de considérer leur proximité ou leur distance ? Au travers d’une étude des différents modes d’expression de ces pratiques - plus particulièrement durant le XXe siècle et dans les domaines du jazz et de l’électroacoustique - nous tenterons de montrer que ces liens sont profonds et s’ancrent dans des modes de pensée du temps particuliers. Ces modes de pensée sous-jacents s’expriment souvent par une propagation diffuse des divisions temporelles - l’aspect rythmique - dans les œuvres, improvisées ou écrites. Nous définirons une typologie qui nous permettra de caractériser les différents processus cognitifs en jeu lors des processus compositionnels, puis nous exposerons les concepts de phase et de propagation des éléments temporels, pour finir par mettre en lumière l’existence d’une émergence et d’une enaction du fait compositionnel, dont l’improvisation et la composition ne sont que deux versants jumeaux.
... According to (Sloboda and Parker, 1985), each tone in a single melodic line can imply a harmony as a mental model of the underlying structure, with similar findings reported in other studies (Thompson and Cuddy, 1989;Platt and Racine, 1994;Holleran et al., 1995). When melody and harmony are presented together in a musical example (when the vertical and horizontal dimensions are presented together), a harmonic frame is established (Povel and Jansen, 2002), which can have two aspects: a global aspect (key and mode) and a local aspect defined as a region within the key, which is assigned to a harmony and defined as a function (e.g., tonic, subdominant, dominant, etc.). ...
... The significant difference in two variables IC cpintfref and E cpintfref suggested through the presence of implied harmonies that all 160 musical excerpts were monophonic melodies and confirmed the salience of implied harmonies in the perception of music (Sloboda and Parker, 1985;Thompson and Cuddy, 1989;Platt and Racine, 1994;Holleran et al., 1995). ...
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%published version: https://www.amcs.uz.zgora.pl/?action=paper&paper=1586% === Regularity in music structure is experienced as a strongly structured texture with repeated and periodic patterns, with the musical ideas presented in an appreciable shape to the human mind. We recently showed that manipulation of musical content (i.e., deviation of musical structure) affects the perception of music. These deviations were detected by musical experts, and the musical pieces containing them were labelled as irregular. In this study, we replaced the human expert involved in detection of (ir)regularity with artificial intelligence algorithms. We evaluated eight variables measuring entropy and information content, which can be evaluated for each musical piece using the computational model Information Dynamics of Music and different viewpoints, and the algorithm was tested using 160 musical excerpts. Preliminary statistical analysis indicated that three of the eight variables were significant predictors of regularity (E cpitch, IC cpintfref, and E cpintfref). Additionally, we observed linear separation between regular and irregular excerpts; therefore, we employed support vector machine and artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms with a linear kernel and linear activation function, respectively, to predict regularity. The final algorithms were capable of predicting regularity with an accuracy ranging from 89 % for the ANN algorithm using only the most significant predictor to 100 % for the ANN algorithm using all eight prediction variables.
... Thus rhythmic structure and harmonic structure can be seen as acting together to establish groupings within the original piece. Relative duration has been shown to act as a powerful determinant of grouping, even for young infants (see Krumhansl & Jusczyck, 1990;Jusczyck & Krumhansl, 1993), while metrical organisation appears to be a primary component of non-musicians' memories of musical works (Sloboda and Parker, 1985) and hence might act as a principal constraint on their manipulations of tonal materials. It could be argued that rhythmic and metrical characteristics of segments had acted as more powerful cues for non-musicians than did putative harmonic function in determining the appropriate ordering of segments; segment-pairs in non-musicians' pieces may thus have closed on even-numbered segments not because of the cadential function of such segments but because adherence to such a strategy would best preserve a periodically-grouped and metrically regular structure through the piece. ...
... As already stated, most previous work on the perception of musical form (such as that reported in Serafine, Glassman & Overbeeke 1989, or in Dibben, 1994 has been conducted employing musician subjects (see also Clarke & Krumhansl, 1990;Krumhansl, 1995). The difficulty of conducting experiments on the musical capacities of non-musicians is pointed up by the fact that those few studies that have investigated non-musicians' perceptions of musical works either have resulted in broad accounts of very general propensities (e.g., Sloboda and Parker, 1985) or have employed fragmentary musical materials and have extrapolated from the patterns of sensitivities to these incomplete materials in proposing theories applicable at the level of complete pieces (e.g., Bigand, 1993a). The experiments reported here sought to employ complete musical pieces and to ensure that subjects' responses and activities during the experiments were minimally constrained, while their response tasks were not dependent on explicit knowledge of the task domain. ...
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ABSTRACT A series of experiments,investigated,cognitive processes,involved,in listening to a piece of music, focusing in particular on the abstraction of surface features (here referred to as cues). Subjects listened to an,unfamiliar,piece in a familiar musical,idiom,and,their sensitivities to aspects,of the just-heard piece were,employed,to elucidate,the nature,of their representations,of the piece in recent memory., The study,also sought,to assess the capacities of subjects to employ,any,declarative,knowledge,of aspects of tonal structure that they possessed,in organising,musical,material. Three experiments,made,use,of different procedures to address these issues, employing either a single short tonal piece - Schubert's Valse Sentimentale, D 779, Op 50, n° 6 - or a variant of this. The first two experiments employed non-musician subjects and examined, respectively, the cues abstracted in listening to the piece, and subjects’ post-listening ability to identify the temporal,location,of segments,of,the,piece. The third,experiment,explored,the constructional abilities of musician and non-musician subjects, requiring them to create a coherent,piece by ordering,the segments,that made,up the original piece. The results of these experiments,indicated that while the abilities of musicians differed from those of non- musicians, both groups of subjects exhibited a weaker sensitivity to features of musical structure than to cues abstracted from the musical,surface. Musical,schemata 3
... The motivation for the present investigation came from the area of music psychology. Following the research approaches to memory for melodies of Sloboda and Parker (1985), Kauffman and Carlsen (1989), and Dowling and colleagues (Dowling et al., 2002) a way to describe the memory representation of a melody is the goal of a current psychological research enterprise (Müllensiefen, in preparation). One necessary tool to find an adequate description of a melodic memory representation seems to be a similarity measure that relates an original melody to its (probably transformed) version in memory in a cognitively appropriate way. ...
... For each melody six comparison variants with " errors " were constructed, resulting in 84 variants of the 14 original melodies. The error types and their distribution were done according to the literature on memory errors for melodies (Sloboda and Parker, 1985; Oura and Hatano, 1988; Zielinska and Miklaszewski, 1992; McNab et al., 1996; Meek & Birmingham, 2002; Pauws, 2002). Five error types with their respective probabilities were defined: Rhythm errors (p=0.6), pitch errors not changing pitch contour (p=0.4), ...
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Melodic similarity is a central concept in many sub-disciplines of musi- cology, as well as for many computer based applications that deal with the classifications and retrieval of melodic material. This paper describes a research paradigm for finding an 'optimal' similarity measure out of a multitude of different approaches and algorithmic variants. The reper- tory used in this study are short melodies from popular (pop) songs and the empirical data for validation stem from two extensive listener ex- periments with expert listeners (musicology students). The different ap- proaches to melodic similarity measurement are first discussed and mathematically systematized. Detailed description of the listener ex- periments are given and the results are discussed. Strengths and weak- nesses of the several tested similarity measures are outlined and an 'op- timal' similarity measure for this specific melodic repertory is proposed.
... Sie wurde vergleichbar den Aufgaben zum Spiel nach Gehör anhand einer kurzen, unbekannten Melodie (s. Abbildung 2) gemessen, womit dieser erste Schritt dem Untersuchungsparadigma des (seriell) melodic recall vonSloboda & Parker (1985; siehe auch Luce, 1958) folgt und einer Empfehlung vonGlaser (2001) entspricht (siehe Abschnitt 'Versuchsdurchführung und -aufbau'). Der prozentuale Anteil korrekt genannter Notennamen ergab den Wert für die Klangvorstellung. ...
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Playing by ear is the most fundamental, though often neglected, musical (sub)skill which, according to the model of mental representations in music performance, is based on “goal imaging” and “motor production”. In playing by ear, the goal imaging of what the music should sound like is based on the aural musical information stored in working memory. Research findings show that musicians with a Background in folk music, jazz or popular music genres have better skills in playing by ear than musicians with training in classical music. Violinists who have had different cultural experiences, especially in jazz and classical music, have not yet been investigated in scientific studies. Furthermore, no research could be found on the melodic imitation of stimuli from culturally familiar and unfamiliar musical genres. We tested violin/viola college students (N = 29) in their abilities to play by ear with two unknown melodies from three different familiar musical genres (Western, jazz, and Indian music). All the students were grounded in Western art music; half of them had additional experiences as jazz musicians. Indian art music was the least familiar to our subjects. Participants were asked (a) how many years they had had experiences in jazz and filled out a questionnaire on (b) how many hours of deliberate practice they had accumulated as an indication of skilled motor production. They were then tested on (c) goal imaging by having to name the notes of an unknown melody by ear. Thus, our method of testing goal imaging measured the integration of melodic retention and analytical hearing – of implicit and explicit musical knowledge. The subjects’ performances in playing by ear were rated by experts. The influence of musical experiences on playing by ear in three different familiar musical styles were investigated by the use of regression analyses. The three independent variables (a) to (c) were not correlated. Our results showed that in the familiar Western context, the best predictors of good performances for playing by ear were accumulated deliberate practice, followed by goal imaging, while experiences in jazz were irrelevant. In the context of jazz melodies, the subjects’ years of experiences as jazz musicians and, second, goal imaging were most important for playing by ear. Consequently, jazz violinists train the motor production they need for playing by ear by participating in activities that are typical for jazz rather than only practicing by themselves. In the less familiar Indian context, goal imaging showed by far the strongest impact on playing by ear. Across the genres, goal imaging and the total accumulated number of practice hours had a greater impact on the performances in which the subjects played by ear than the subjects’ years of experiences as jazz musicians. Our results showed, furthermore, that goal imaging led to advantages in playing by ear and especially in participating in cross-cultural settings. Classical and jazz musicians gained the Motor production needed for playing by ear long-term in culture-specific ways and could retrieve it more easily in familiar musical genres. Thus, Western music education has to focus more strongly on the integration of aural playing and musical understanding, especially on ear-hand-coordination in varying contexts. This enables participation in a broad variety of musical cultures and creative practices. Future Research should explore further predictors on the important, foundational skill of playing by ear, which has an essential influence on the development of a comprehensive musicianship and the continuing motivation to play a musical instrument.
... All melodies were composed to an isochronous rhythm of quarter notes to hold rhythmic factors constant (Hébert & Peretz, 1997). Stimuli were composed on a modal scale commonly used in world musics (Maqam Kurd, in Arabic music, also known as the Phrygian mode in medieval music), in order to reduce the likelihood that the stimuli might cue a similar, familiar melody in memory (Sloboda & Parker, 1985). ...
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Distinctive stimuli are better recognized than typical stimuli in many domains (e.g., faces, words). Distinctiveness predicts the point of recognition of a melody (Bailes, 2010), and the recognition of unique tones within a melody (Vuvan, Podolak, & Schmuckler, 2014), yet no studies have examined the role of distinctiveness in recognizing whole melodies. We composed a set of novel melodies according to rules that should result in these being perceived as more or less distinctive. Using computational analysis and human ratings by a group of 36 pilot testers, we established a final stimulus set of 96 novel melodies (48 eightnote, 48 sixteen-note), half of which were high and half low in distinctiveness. A separate group of 26 participants completed a recognition test using this stimulus set. Using linear mixed-effects modeling, we found that greater pitch and interval range, wider intervals, varied contour, and ambiguous tonality within a Western diatonic framework predicted human perception of distinctiveness. However, only a wider modal (most frequent) interval predicted correct recognition. Distinctiveness improved recognition performance in both stimulus lengths; however, a significant advantage was only shown for sixteen-note melodies. Thus, the distinctiveness effect as observed across domains generalizes to the recognition of longer, whole melodies.
... The findings apply to any theory which presents musical structure in terms of binary trees. The fundamental idea of hierarchical music structure is widely accepted, and supported by empirical evidence drawn from sources ranging from human's association of a musical extract with its reduction [1,13], to Classical variations [12], to memory and performance errors [17]. ...
Conference Paper
Following earlier work on the formalisation of Lerdahl and Jack-endoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM), we present a measure of the salience of events in a reduction tree, based on calculations relating the duration of time-spans to the structure of the tree. This allows for the proper graphical rendition of a tree on the basis of its time-spans and topology alone. It also has the potential to contribute to the development of sophisticated digital library systems able to operate on music in a musically intelligent manner. We present results of an empirical study of branch heights in the figures in GTTM which shows that salience calculated according to our proposals correlates better with branch height than alternatives. We also discuss the possible musical significance of this measure of salience. Finally we compare some results using salience in the calculation of melodic similarity on the basis of reduction trees to earlier results using time-span. While the correlation between these measures and human ratings of the similarity of the melodies is poor, using salience shows a definite improvement. Overall, the results suggest that the proposed definition of salience gives a potentially useful measure of an event's importance in a musical structure.
... By comparison, the literature on harmonic processing in the perception of tonal melodies is relatively limited. However, the studies that have been published to date have demonstrated that listeners can infer harmonic information from tonal melodies and that successful interpretation of implied harmony is important in the perception of tonal melodies (Holleran, Jones, & Butler, 1995;Platt & Racine, 1994;Povel & Jansen, 2001Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Trainor & Trehub, 1994). In recognition tasks, both musicians and nonmusicians detect pitch changes in tonal melodies more easily when the changed pitch suggests harmonic change as well; specifically, when the changed pitch belongs to a chord different than the chord implied by the original pitch (Holleran et al., 1995;Platt & Racine, 1994;Schubert & Stevens, 2006). ...
Article
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THE IMPORTANCE OF HARMONY PERCEPTION IN understanding tonal melodies has been extensively studied, but underlying processes of implied harmonic perception remain unexplored. This study explores how listeners perceive implied harmony in real-time while hearing tonal melodies by addressing two questions: How is each tone of a tonal melody harmonically interpreted and integrated into the previous tones? How do harmonic expectations of ‘‘what’’ chord will follow and ‘‘when’’ the chord change will occur affect the processing? Participants with music training listened to tonal melodies and responded to target tones by singing their pitches as quickly as possible. The target tones implied an expected or an unexpected chord; they occurred at expected or unexpected times. The results showed that sing-back reaction times (RTs) were shorter for: 1) tones implying an expected chord; and 2) chord changes occurring at expected times, suggesting that harmonic expectations facilitate the processing of tonal melodies. Also, RTs became shorter over the presentation of successive target tones implying the same chord, suggesting that implied harmony becomes clearer as more tones belonging to a single chord are presented. © 2018 By The Regents Of The University Of California All Rights Reserved.
... For each melody, six comparison variants with 'errors' were constructed by changing individual notes, resulting in 84 variants of the 14 original melodies. The error types and their distribution were created according to the literature on human memory errors for melodies (Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Oura & Hatano, 1988;Zielinska & Miklaszewski, 1992;McNab, Smith, Witten, Henderson, & Cunningham, 1996;Meek & Birmingham, 2002;Pauws, 2002). Five error types with their respective probabilities were defined: (1) Rhythm errors with a probability of p = 0.6 to occur in any given melody; (2) pitch errors not changing pitch contour ( p = 0.4); (3) pitch errors changing the contour ( p = 0.2); (4) errors in phrase order ( p = 0.2); (5) modulation errors (pitch errors that result in a transition into a new key; p = 0.2). ...
Article
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Similarity is an important concept in music cognition research since the similarity between (parts of) musical pieces determines perception of stylistic categories and structural relationships between parts of musical works. The purpose of the present research is to develop and test models of musical similarity perception inspired by a transformational approach which conceives of similarity between two perceptual objects in terms of the complexity of the cognitive operations required to transform the representation of the first object into that of the second, a process which has been formulated in information-theoretic terms. Specifically, computational simulations are developed based on compression distance in which a probabilistic model is trained on one piece of music and then used to predict, or compress, the notes in a second piece. The more predictable the second piece according to the model, the more efficiently it can be encoded and the greater the similarity between the two pieces. The present research extends an existing information-theoretic model of auditory expectation (IDyOM) to compute compression distances varying in symmetry and normalisation using high-level symbolic features representing aspects of pitch and rhythmic structure. Comparing these compression distances with listeners’ similarity ratings between pairs of melodies collected in three experiments demonstrates that the compression-based model provides a good fit to the data and allows the identification of representations, model parameters and compression-based metrics that best account for musical similarity perception. The compression-based model also shows comparable performance to the best-performing algorithms on the MIREX 2005 melodic similarity task.
... It has been found in experimental studies that distributions of errors are closely linked to hierarchical levels, most errors occurring when items at subordinate levels were involved, fewer errors at intermediate levels, and the fewest at higher levels. These results show that higher levels of a hierarchy are more accessible and that information can either be recalled directly or be reconstructed inferentially (Sloboda and Parker, 1985). Subordinate information, on the contrary, seems to be more difficult to infer. ...
Thesis
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This thesis investigates the psychological implications of prolongation, a structural phenomenon of tonal music, which is described in the musicological literature as an elaborative process in which some pitch events - such as chords and notes - remain as if they were sounding even though they are not physically present. In spite of its theoretical value as an analytical device, the question of prolongation as experienced still remains. Its cognitive scope was thoroughly explored in two groups of experiments: in part 1 prolongation was hypothesized as a constituent organization, in which the linear continuity of the voice-leading as it unfolds is parsed into syntactical units with beginnings and endings. The listener’s capacity to identify prolongational boundaries was tested under experimental conditions that explored the moment-to-moment sensitivity to prolongation in music-attending tasks. A clear ontology of prolongation as a constituent percept, at foreground reductional levels of the underlying structure, emerged unequivocally from the experimental results. However, this research did not fully explain an imaginative component that, according to Schenkerian theory, is present in the concept of prolongation. Alternative views of human cognition, related to the study of embodied knowledge and metaphorical thinking, were pursued in order to answer this question. In part 2 it was hypothesised that prolongation would be experienced as a structural metaphor. The interrupted structure, an archetypal organization of tonal music, was investigated on the assumption that this underlying configuration, interacting with cognition, primes in music perception the activation of an image-schematic structure - involving force. By means of a cross-domain mapping process, the listener projects that image-schematic structure onto the sonic organization of the piece, understanding the interrupted structure as a sonic iii unfolding of the force schema. The results confirmed the hypothesis: prolongation has a relevant status as imagined cognition. Structural metaphors operate as idealized models of cognitive processing that listeners activate during their experience of music.
... More strikingly, Bigand (1990) showed that nonmusicians had an ability similar to that of musicians to classify superficially different conventional tonal melodies into groups containing underlying structural similarities. Studies of memory recall for melodies (Sloboda and Parker, 1985) have shown that musicians and nonmusicians have similar abilities to preserve higher-order structure at the expense of note-to-note detail. ...
Chapter
[Reprinted from K. A. Ericcson & J. Smith Eds. (1991) Towards a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects amd Limits. Cambridge University Press, pp 153-171.] -------------------------------- This chapter treats six connected issues of musical expertise. It examines the difficulties associated with characterising expertise in a way that offers a genuine foothold for cognitive psychology, and suggests that expertise may not, in fact, be ‘special’ in any cognitively interesting sense. It goes on to review some experimental studies of music, which suggest that most members of a culture possess tacit musical expertise, expressed in their ability to use high-level structural information in carrying out a variety of perceptual tasks. This expertise seems to be acquired through casual exposure to the musical forms and activities of the culture. The chapter then provides two detailed examples of exceptional musical expertise that apparently developed in the absence of formal instruction, suggesting that normal and ‘exceptional’ expertise may be parts of a single continuum. It finally discusses that musical expertise requires an apprehension of a structure-emotion mapping
... game plausible) boards better than random boards (Chase and Simon, 1973). Second, people who 'make sense' of music tend to make grammatically plausible substitutions when asked to recall music they have just heard (Sloboda and Parker, 1985;Oura and Hatano, 1988). This is similar to the well-established finding that people rarely remember verbal information word-for-word, but reconstruct in their own words something that means the same as what they heard. ...
Chapter
[First published in Italian as "Doto musicale e inattismo?" In J. J. Nattiez Ed. (2002) Enceiclopedia della Musica: Vol II. Il sapere musicali. Torino Guiliano Einaudi Editore. pp 508-529]----------------------------------------------------- It is very common for observers to invoke the notion of ‘talent’ or ‘gift’ when they hear music. This is usually connected to the notion that such capacities are fixed and immutable. These kinds of lay explanations can then lead to prescriptions for action. For instance it may be concluded that child A will be able to profit from music instruction whereas child B will not. It is really important to grasp that there is absolutely nothing within the performances of these two children which logically invokes explanations in term of ‘talent’. They have exactly equal innate potential or aptitude for musical activity. This chapter also states that musical ability entails the ability to detect and use these structures in the mental manipulation of music. Another term that is sometimes used for the process of making sense of music is ‘audiation
... Non-musicians, however, appear to make sense of music in a similar way as do trained musicians. They are able to efficiently discriminate, identify and predict key features and structures in music, categorize melodic sequences that are similar and different, apply segmentation rules to unfamiliar sequences, recall melodies on the basis of global features and identify intended emotions in a piece (Bigand, 2004; Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006; Deliege & El Ahmahdi, 1990; Krumhansl, 1995; Sloboda & Parker, 1985; Tillman, Bharucha, & Bigand, 2000). This knowledge about music is acquired implicitly as a result of everyday exposure to music— through lullabies, play songs, and electronic media— independent of explicit music training (Bigand, 2003; Sloboda, 2005 ). ...
Article
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Musicianship is traditionally denoted by a history and level of expertise achieved through formal music training. In research investigating cognitive and health benefits of music, it has been usual for a distinction to be made between =musicians' and nonmusicians'. In this chapter, we explore a range of other forms of engagement with music, including active listening, and affective, analytical, social and physical styles of engagement. The more controversial evidence that other forms of music engagement may confer similar non-musical cognitive benefits (albeit to a lesser degree) as formal music training is reviewed. The implications of revisiting the definition of musicianship in research on music benefits for health and cognition are presented. This chapter highlights the need for a more continuous and comprehensive measure of music engagement for the investigation of the benefits of music on mental health and well-being.
... Results from experimental studies (e.g. [15,24,42]) on music perception and recall should also be taken into account for choosing music representations. They provide theories which can be employed and tested by musical pattern discovery. ...
Conference Paper
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This paper discusses the current state of knowledge on musical pattern finding. Various studies propose computational methods to find repeated musical patterns. Our detailed review of these studies reveals important challenges in musical pattern finding research: different methods have not yet been directly compared, and the influence of music representation and filtering on the results has not been assessed. Moreover, we need a thorough understanding of musical patterns as perceived by human listeners. A sound evaluation methodology is still lacking. Consequently, we suggest perspectives for musical pattern finding: future research can provide a comparison of different methods, and an assessment of different music representations and filtering criteria. A combination of quantitative and qualitative methods can overcome the lacking evaluation methodology. Musical patterns identified by human listeners form a reference, but also an object of study, as computational methods can help us understand the criteria underlying human notions of musical repetition.
... Other studies have also found evidence for sensitivity to emergent-level structure in melody. Memory for short and simple melodic structures appears to preserve emergent-level structure (Bigand, 1990, Exp. 3;Deutsch & Feroe, 1981;Sloboda & Parker, 1985). Listeners prefer correct over incorrect melodic reductions (Dibben, 1994;Serafine et al., 1989), and are able to perceive tonal tension in non-adjacent dependencies (Lerdahl & Krumhansl, 2007; see also Cuddy & Smith, 2000;Smith & Cuddy, 2003). ...
Article
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FOUR EXPERIMENTS ASSESSED THE INFLUENCE of emergent-level structure on melodic processing difficulty. Emergent-level structure was manipulated across experiments and defined with reference to the Implication-Realization model of melodic expectancy (Narmour, 1990, 1992, 2000). Two measures of melodic processing difficulty were used to assess the influence of emergent-level structure: serial-reconstruction and cohesion ratings. In the serial-reconstruction experiment (Experiment 1), reconstruction was more efficient for melodies with simple emergent-level structure. In the cohesion experiments (Experiments 2-4), ratings were higher for melodies with simple emergent-level structure, and the advantage was generally greater in the presence of simple surface-level structure. Results indicate that emergent-level structure as defined by the model can influence melodic processing difficulty.
... It would therefore appear that harmonic hierarchies established by the tonal system constitute a good way of summarizing musical information contained in relatively long melodies. (Bigand 1993:256) Experiments testing the recall of metric structure and harmonic structure (Sloboda and Parker 1985) also suggest that the hierarchical representation of musical information contained in segments of a musical surface assists listeners in reconstructing relationships between those segments. This may seem an obvious point, but Bigand underlines its importance by quoting Meyer: Hierarchical structures are of signal (sic) importance because they enable the composer to invent and the listener to comprehend complex interreactive musical relationships. ...
Conference Paper
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This paper aims to shed some light on the interpretational challenges for the listener, and to develop a framework for the analysis of acousmatic music based upon perceptual processes. In previous papers I have noted the problem of lack of score in the analysis of acousmatic music. Thus one must focus on real-time listening processes rather than an abstract score. Models of listening from cognitive psychology have been researched quite extensively for tonal music. As its starting point this paper takes the theories of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, as they pertain to tonal music, and the model of 'event structure processing' as developed by Emmanuel Bigand. Listeners possess a knowledge of musical categories and structures, for the culture in which they belong, even though the knowledge may not be explicit. In Western tonal music, much of the attention is on the organization of pitch, and this has been the focus of much of the research in cognitive psychology. This paper attempts an expansion of Bigand's model to include timbral considerations in order to formulate a cognitive framework for listening to, and analysis of, acousmatic music.
... Alty (2002) offered an explanation of this in terms of the limits of working memory which, according to Miller (1956), can handle around seven concurrent bits (or chunks) of information. In experiments on melody recall Sloboda and Parker (1985) found that the most fundamental feature preserved in a recalled melody was its metrical structure. Musicians and non-musicians differed significantly only on one measure, that of the ability to retain the harmonic structure of the original melody. ...
Article
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In this chapter we are concerned with external auditory representations of programs, also known as program auralization. As program auralization systems tend to use musical representations they are necessarily affected by artistic and aesthetic considerations. Therefore, it is instructive to explore program auralization in the light of aesthetic computing principles.
... According to cognitive studies, metric and rhythmic structures play a central role in the perception of melodic similarity. For instance, in the immediate recall of a simple melody studied in [8] the metrical structure was the most accurately remembered structural feature. In this paper we demonstrate that melodies belonging to the same melody group can successfully be retrieved based on rhythmic similarity. ...
Article
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In this paper we investigate the role of rhythmic similar- ity as part of melodic similarity in the context of Folksong research. We define a rhythmic similarity measure based on Inner Metric Analysis and apply it to groups of simi- lar melodies. The comparison with a similarity measure of the SIMILE software shows that the two models agree on the number of melodies that are considered very simi- lar, but disagree on the less similar melodies. In general, we achieve good results with the retrieval of melodies us- ing rhythmic information, which demonstrates that rhyth- mic similarity is an important factor to consider in melodic similarity.
... There is comparatively little research on recall for music stored in longterm memory; exceptions include Sloboda and Parker (1985), who showed that experts' and novices' recall for newlymemorized folksongs was far from verbatim, although harmonic and, especially, metrical structure was preserved. Indeed the majority of studies of recall for the words and music of songs focus on those that are newly memorized (see Ginsborg & Sloboda, 2007, for a review), and almost none involve expert musicians or their recall for music as well as words. ...
Article
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This study forms part of a longitudinal case study of a singer's preparation for performance and long-term recall of a piece of music, the first Ricercar from Stravinsky's Cantata. Content analyses of talk with the pianist with whom she rehearsed, and who conducted the public performance of the piece, have been reported, as has an analysis of the effect of performance cues on practice behaviour. In this paper we report accuracy of memory in three free recalls undertaken 18, 32 and 42 months after the performance. The singer's memory was surprisingly durable; there was a significant decrease in accuracy of recall after 18 months to 75% but thereafter accuracy decreased only gradually to 66% three and a half years after the performance. Memory for melody appears to be more reliable than for words but both are likely to be forgotten together, confirming earlier findings suggesting that words are stored and retrieved in association with the melody to which they are set.
... Ethnomusicologists have long been aware of the problematic relationship between music and conventional notation (e.g., Seeger, 1958;Nettl, 1983). Some point to the inadequacy of SN as a means of specifying the intended musical sound (e.g., Seeger, 1958;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Sloboda, 1988;Cook, 1992). Others debate whether transcription (the reduction of sound from live performance or recordings to SN) is the highest form of musical cognition. ...
Article
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Facing the ambiguous status of in-school music literacy, this follow-up eight-year study aims to touch on the effects of traditional staff notation (SN) learning on student's intuitive symbolizing behavior and musical perception. Subjects were 47 second-graders attending a religious Jewish school in Israel. One ‘pre-literate’ meeting, in which students graphically represented a ‘Darbuka rhythm’, was held prior to any formal in-school SN learning. Following this, two replica meetings were held: a ‘literate’ meeting as these students entered the sixth-grade and participated in a SN in-school course; and a ‘post-literate’ meeting as they entered the ninth-grade. Some 51 notations were collected from 17 students who participated in the three meetings (17×3). In order to study the effects of formal learning in isolation from the process of maturation, replica meetings were held with 87 ‘non-literate’ ninth-graders who had never learned SN. All 138 notations were classified under four categories of perception: A: associative images; P: pictogram-musical instruments; F: formal response—representations of sound-sequences, and G: Gestalt—representations of musical units. Results indicate that SN learning significantly affected the students’ symbolizing behaviour and musical perception. A change from intuitive F responses to integrated A/F reactions was typical of SN learners. Findings bear practical implications for pedagogy.
... The majority of music serial-recall tasks require the ability to sing (Sloboda & Parker, 1985) or a knowledge of 2002; J. L. Jones, Lucker, Zalewski, Brewer, & Drayna, 2009;Overy, 2003). ...
Article
Working memory is the temporary storage system that is assumed to underpin our capacity for coherent thought. One working memory model (WMM) assumes an attentional control component, the central executive, together with two subsystems, the visuo-spatial sketchpad that is capable of storing visual and spatial information, and the phonological loop which holds and manipulates speech-like information. Although the WMM has been applied across a wide range of situations, there is little work on its application to music. The present study attempts to apply to music one of the major phenomena of the phonological loop, the observation that immediate recall of sequences of words or letters is impaired when they are similar in sound. (e.g. PCVTD vs. XKWYR). Two experiments were performed, in both of which subjects heard and attempted to reproduce sequences of notes that were either close together in pitch height (proximal) or far apart (distant). Memory for proximal sequences was poorer than for distant in both experiments, lending support to the possibility that the phonological loop may also be capable of holding musical sequences.
... Although musical memory can use auditory representations of pitch (Deutsch, 1982;Hubbard & Stoeckig, 1992), melody and rhythm (Jones, 1993), tempo and harmony (Halpern, 1992), metrical structure (Sloboda & Parker, 1985), and combinations of these (Deutsch, 1969;Sloboda, 1987), it can also use emotional, kinesthetic, and visual representations (Catán, 1989;Intons-Peterson, 1992;Mainwaring, 1933;Sloboda, 1987;Walker, 1978). For example, musically knowledgeable participants remembered pitch better when they moved their fingers as if playing a tune on a piano than without such kinesthetic representation (Mikumo, 1994). ...
Article
We examined the ability to detect a match between a piece of music and a dance intended to express it. We used three pieces of music and three dances, and we presented these under the four following conditions. (1) Sequential selection: participants were presented with a piece of music and then selected, from among three sequentially presented dances, the one that best matched the music; or they were presented with a dance and then selected, from among three sequentially presented musical pieces, the one that best matched the dance. (2) Sequential judgment: participants were presented with a piece of music followed by a dance, or with a dance followed by I piece of music, and decided how well these matched. (3) Simultaneous judgment: participants were presented simultaneously with a piece of music and a dance and decided how well these matched. (4) Isolated presentation: participants were presented with either a dance or a musical piece and answered questions about its characteristics and their responses to it. Participants in the first three conditions answered similar questions about how they made their decision about the match between music and dance. A total of 942 university students participated. In the sequential selection condition, participants successfully matched the music with the dance intended to express it. In the sequential judgment and simultaneous judgment conditions, participants acknowledged matches between congruent music and dance, but also noted matches between music and dance not intended to be congruent. The various means by which participants detected a match between music and dance are examined.
... Bigand (1990) found that listeners were capable of correctly grouping tone sequences with the same harmonic structure, suggesting that they had made a representation of the chord progression. In a study by Sloboda and Parker (1985) in which respondents were required to recall a melody by singing, the reproduced melodies preserved the harmonic structure of the original melody or yielded a new but consistent harmonic structure. Jansen and Povel (submitted-b) performed a study in which listeners responded to tone sequences with different combinations of underlying chords. ...
Article
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A model is proposed for the On-Line Harmonic Processing (OLHP) of tonal melodic sequences in which each incoming tone is described in terms of its features Fittingness, compliance with the previous harmony, Uncertainty, ambiguity of a new harmony and, Chord Change, goodness of the connection between previous and new harmony. To test this model in Experiment 1 listeners rated the musical logic of 10-tone sequences presented with an induced segmentation in groups of 3-3-3-1, and following an harmonic progression of I-target-V-I, respectively, with the harmonic functions I, II, III, IV, V, or VI inserted as target fragment. The results support the Chord Change feature of the model. In Experiment 2 these sequences were rated as tone-by-tone increasing fragments, starting from the initial 3 tones up to the complete sequence. The ratings of the incremental sequences supported the findings of the first experiment. The three features in the model explained 46.4 % of the variance in the target ratings, although Uncertainty seemed to have no effect. In a comparison with two other models OLHP model performed best. Finally, an a-posteriori model consisting of Chord Change and a variable quantifying pitch proximity between consecutive tones accounted for a major part of the variance. It is concluded that listeners employ OLHP's features in their representation of the sequences and that both harmony and pitch height are indispensable factors in a model of melody perception.
... A possible way taken by the aforementioned studies was to calculate the ratio between common notes in both melodies and overall notes in the original melody. But this approach hardly reflects the fact that the original and recall may differ in many improvised notes, but that on other levels of human melodic understanding the sung rendition might be " highly related to the original in many respects " (Sloboda & Parker, 1985, p. 159). Thus Sloboda and Parker recognized in 1985: " There is no theory of melodic identity " . ...
Article
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In this paper we describe the usage of algorithmic meas- ures for music structure in the analysis of data from an experiment on melody recall. The 31 subjects' experimen- tal task was to sing back a novel melody presented either as single note MIDI melody or as the vocal melodies in audio excerpts from real pop songs. Each subject was tested with 14 different melodies and could use up to 6 tri- als for each melody. The aim of the data analysis was to predict the similarity between the original melody and the sung recalls by the subjects. The similarity was measured with different algorithmic measures reflecting various structural aspects of melodies, e.g. melodic contour, inter- vals, rhythm, or melodic accents. Among the results of the data analysis are the descriptions of different learning curves for the different structural aspects over trials, and the general importance or persistence of the different musi- cal dimensions in memory. Although the study was carried out with 31 subjects due to the very time consuming proc- ess of transcription of the subjects' sung recalls, the pre- liminary data analysis presented in ties paper is based solely on 10 subjects.
... 1982), as do various types of regularities in musical structure (e.g., Bigand, 1990;Cuddy, Cohen, & Mewhort, 1981;Deliège, 1992Deliège, , 1996Deutsch, 1980;Halpern, 1984;Povel & Van Egmond, 1993;Serafine, Glassman, & Overbeeke, 1989;Sloboda & Parker, 1985;Tan, Aiello, & Bever, 1981; see also Howell, West, & Cross, 1991). ...
Article
To gain a better understanding of the processes by which human listen- ers construct musical percepts within the Western tonal system, we con- ducted two experiments in which the perception of brief tone series was studied. The tone seriesconsistedof (fragments from) differentorderings of the collection C4 E4 F 4 G4 B 4 and were preceded by two chords to induce a key. Two differenttasks were used: (1) rating the melodic "good- ness" of the tone series and (2) playing a few tones that complete the tone series. In Experiment 1, tone series of different lengths were pre- sented in blocks. In Experiments 2a and 2b, increasing fragments of tone series were presented to examine the development of musical percepts. The majority of the data can be explained by two perceptual mecha- nisms:chord recognition and anchoring. Chord recognition is the mecha- nism that describes a series of tones in terms of a chord, a mental unit stored in long-term memory. Anchoring is the mechanism by which a tone is linked to a tone occurring later in the series. The paradigm ap- pears to be a powerful tool for tracing perceptual mechanisms at work in the on-line processing of music.
Chapter
The available evidence points to the conclusion that the vast majority of the population has acquired a common receptive musical ability, clearly evident through experimental demonstration, regardless of accomplishment in any particular sphere of musical performance, and regardless of having been in receipt of any formal musical education or training. There is broad agreement between music theorists and psychologists that the most prevalent musical idioms have structural and mathematical properties that make them easily analysable by universal pre-cultural mechanisms of auditory perceptual grouping. Connectionist models of learning applied to music demonstrate one way in which complex mental representations might be built up from such simple groupings on the basis of repeated exposure to a variety of musical examples sharing similar structures. This chapter states that what makes any performance musically interesting are the slight fluctuations in duration, loudness, pitch, and timbre which together constitute expressive performance.
Article
The primary purposes of this study were (1) to determine the effect of three encoding conditions (singing, playing, studying silently) on participants’ music memorization accuracy; (2) to examine potential differences between choral, jazz, and concert band musicians’ accuracy in completing the music memorization task; and (3) to determine whether ensemble affiliation yielded any performance advantages among the three presentation conditions. Three folk melodies were selected for memorization under the three encoding conditions. Participants ( N = 81) had 75 s to commit each melody to memory while studying silently, singing, or playing on a keyboard. Participants then notated the three melodies using conventional staff notation. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures on one factor revealed significant differences based on participants’ ensemble affiliation. A Tukey’s honest significant difference (HSD) post hoc test revealed the jazz group had higher accuracy scores than the band group. No significant differences were found based on encoding conditions, and no significant interactions were found between the encoding conditions and ensemble groups. The experiment is framed by questions related to memory, reading, and differing notions of literacy.
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Capitolo tratto da Cattaneo P. , Boni C.A., (2016). Musicoterapia nelle Case per Anziani del Canton Ticino. Bellinzona: Repubblica e Cantone Ticino. Dipartimento della sanità e della socialità
Article
This research examines the effect of repetition on melodic dictation tasks in an undergraduate ear-training class. A pilot group of freshman music majors (n = 17) were asked to notate four melodies, of which two were slightly more difficult since they contained more melodic leaps. Participants heard two melodies repeated three times and two other melodies six times. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) suggests that the number of repetitions had a significant effect on participants’ dictation accuracy, both for scores on pitch and on rhythm. In addition, dictation accuracy was significantly lower when the melodies contained more leaps (controlling for other factors). Overall, we found a statistical interaction between the number of repetitions and the number of leaps in the melody, both of which factors affect the working memory load in these dictation tasks. Given the similarity of the notated melodies, these findings suggest that ear-training pedagogues must carefully select melodic dictations appropriate for student ability and control the number of melodic leaps. Furthermore, we found evidence that the variance in working memory for music among this population is wider than Karpinski (2000) hypothesizes. These findings provide pedagogues with melodic characteristics well-suited for the average incoming freshman music major. Finally, this first empirical evidence of the dictation ability of incoming undergraduate music majors invites a long-term study on the extent to which working memory and/or chunking ability may increase during the multi-semester ear-training curriculum.
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1. La segmentazione del continuum acustico: principi e limiti generali Nella maggior parte dei casi la musica è un arte che nasce dall'interazione di tre entità: il compositore, l'esecutore, l'ascoltatore. Di conseguenza l'analisi musicale dovrebbe porre attenzione non solo al lavoro del compositore e alla partitura da lui realizzata, ma anche all'apporto creativo dell'interprete che (ri)traduce il segno in suono e dell'ascoltatore che, a sua volta, (ri)assegna al suono un senso. A questo proposito Bent afferma come "tutti gli aspetti dell'analisi musicale intesa come attività sottointendono quel fondamentale punto di contatto tra la mente e il suono musicale che è la percezione musicale" [Bent-Drabkin 1990, 1-2]. Ma a quale "mente" si riferisce Bent? Nell'analizzare l'ambiente acustico che lo circonda l'ascoltatore utilizza diverse strategie cognitive: alcune dipendono da regole simili comuni ad ogni essere umano già rilevabili a partire dai primi mesi di vita, altre si sviluppano lungo l'arco della vita di un qualsiasi soggetto, altre ancora sono legate a specifiche competenze o abilità sviluppate spesso attraverso una sufficiente esposizione ad un particolare idioma. È proprio nello studio di queste strategie cognitive che l'analisi musicale e la psicologia della musica possono trovare un campo d'indagine condivisibile. L'analisi musicale può trarre vantaggio dai risultati sperimentali già acquisiti dalla psicologia della musica per verificare se e fino a che punto le proprie intuizioni analitiche possano trovare un fondamento oggettivo nelle risposte di un gruppo statisticamente significativo di soggetti. Viceversa alla psicologia della musica può essere utile una competenza specificatamente musicale per verificare la pertinenza dei paradigmi sperimentali con la realtà musicale "fuori dal laboratorio". Una delle strategie utilizzate dall'ascoltatore sulla quale converge sia l'interesse della psicologia della musica sia quello dell'analisi riguarda la segmentazione del continuum acustico. Per l'analisi musicale la segmentazione è uno strumento utile per comprendere sia la struttura del materiale musicale, sia le ragioni di un determinato fraseggio realizzato dall'interprete o suggerito dal compositore. Per la psicologia della musica, invece, la segmentazione è una strategia cognitiva per lo più inconsapevole, in parte indipendente dalla competenza musicale [Drake 1998] e dall'età, utilizzata per ricordare, confrontare, giudicare ciò che ascoltiamo. I risultati sperimentali disponibili rendono legittime alcune domande. Le variabili che determinano la divisione 1 Le problematiche affontate dal presente lavoro non sarebbero state mai affrontate dall'autore senza le stimolanti sollecitazioni di Marta Olivetti Belardinelli che qui calorosamente si ringrazia. Un doveroso ringraziamento va anche ad Egidio Pozzi e Roberta Gottardi per l'attenta revisione del manoscritto.
Chapter
Language does not use an arbitrary collection of noises to convey different meanings. Instead, a small number of sound elements, which are themselves meaningless, are put together in various combinations to make words. In classical structuralist linguistics, this characteristic of language is referred to as “the phonemic principle”. In subsequent work, the phoneme has given way to distinctive features and autosegmental tiers, but the idea is preserved that meaningful forms are built up by regularly combining a small number of meaningless sound elements. Let us therefore speak of “the phonological principle.” Because of this fact about language, it is reasonable to develop a theory of phonology as such.
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Thesis
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Text of the Fifth Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture given at a meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society in Durham, 8Apr1976.
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Describes the development of a computer program which will transcribe a live performance of a classical melody into the equivalent of standard musical notation. It is intended to embody, in computational form, a psychological theory of how Western musicians perceive the rhythmic and tonal relationships between the notes of such melodies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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Data on piano performance were obtained by recording movements in the piano action and storing the digitized signals in a computer. In this way the performances were examined of different professional pianists playing a Chopin Study, a Bach Fugue, and a Bartok Dance. This article provides a description of some of the phenomena of skilled performance and it examines two problems, one on the nature of motor independence and the other on the mechanisms of movement timing. The discussion is couched within the framework of a theory of motor programming. This supposes that the motor program generates and maintains two representations of output, an abstract homomorphism that specifies the syntax of movements together with a set of expressive features, and an array of motor commands that give the explicit targets of movement. The hierarchic construction of these representations provides a nesting of streams of information under superordinate codes, which enables movement independence. An internal clock is used to generate markers for the timing of output. It can change its rate or produce elastically deformed time scales in response to the expressive features marked in the abstract representation.
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The occurrence of relatively long notes, and the repetition of melodic phrases are important cues to the metre, or regular beat, of a piece of music. A model of how people use this information to infer the metre of unaccompanied melodies is described here. The model is in the form of a computer program, and involves a definition of melodic repetition which encompasses repetitions that include certain kinds of variation. The program has been applied to the task of analysing the metric structure of the forty-eight fugue subjects of the Well-Tempered Clavier by J S Bach. The program is discussed in relation to other models both of musical understanding and of sequential concept learning.
Article
A repeated listening procedure was designed to monitor changes in listener's appreciation of thematic categories in musical compositions. Subjects listened to a recorded musical composition. Passages selected from the composition were then played in pairs, and listeners rated their similarity. The similarity data were submitted to INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling procedure, which located the passages in an n-dimensional space. This procedure was repeated in three separate sessions, so that changes in the perceived musical structure could be observed. In Study 1, subjects heard Liszt's Sonata in b, and target passages were Theme A, Theme B, and three variations of each theme. While extrathematic dimensions dominated early acquaintance, a theme dimension emerged in the second and third sessions. Musicians gave higher weight to the theme dimension than did nonmusicians, and theme was the only dimension for experts on this sonata. Musicians were also more accurate in a final classification test, but only after repeated listening. The effect of repeated exposure on transfer to new theme exemplars was considered in Study 2. It is hoped this work will foster more naturalistic approaches to musical cognition.
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