January 1985
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9 Reads
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72 Citations
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.