Memory for musical tones: The impact of tonality and the creation of false memories (original) (raw)
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Psychological Research, 2014
A melody's identity is determined by relations between consecutive tones in terms of pitch and duration, whereas surface features (i.e., pitch level or key, tempo, and timbre) are irrelevant. Although surface features of highly familiar recordings are encoded into memory, little is known about listeners' mental representations of melodies heard once or twice. It is also unknown whether musical pitch is represented additively or interactively with temporal information. In two experiments, listeners heard unfamiliar melodies twice in an initial exposure phase. In a subsequent test phase, they heard the same (old) melodies interspersed with new melodies. Some of the old melodies were shifted in key, tempo, or key and tempo. Listeners' task was to rate how well they recognized each melody from the exposure phase while ignoring changes in key and tempo. Recognition ratings were higher for old melodies that stayed the same compared to those that were shifted in key or tempo, and detrimental effects of key and tempo changes were additive in between-subjects (Experiment 1) and within-subjects (Experiment 2) designs. The results confirm that surface features are remembered for melodies heard only twice. They also imply that key and tempo are processed and stored independently.
In Further Search of Tonal Grounds in Short Term Memory of Melodies
Taylor & Pembrook (1983) proposed several factors to affect short-term memory for melodies. We reassessed their findings using a more controlled stimulus set and a 2-alternative forced choice (Experiment 1) or same/different test (Experiment 2) instead of a dictation or singing-back task. Nonmusicians listened to a total of 158 isochronous 5-tone melodies. Each melody was followed by a same-length retention interval filled with silence, nonsense syllables, a nondiatonic melody, or a diatonic melody, and a subsequent test with same-contour lures. In both experiments and across all conditions listeners showed above-chance short-term recognition performance. We replicated Taylor & Pembrook's recency effect for the 5 th note of the sequences but also found a full J-shaped serial position curve (recency>primacy>center). Secondly, listeners performed better for tone sequences that were either fully ascending or descending than those with melodic direction changes. Thirdly, listeners were better in noticing a changed note that occurred at a point of melodic direction change (e. g., Ù or Ú). In Experiment 1 but not 2, we furthermore found that this " corner note effect " was even more pronounced if that note was preceded by a " skip " (3 or more semitones) instead of a " step " (2 or less semitones) pitch interval. The latter finding was somewhat similar to Taylor and Pembrook's finding that listeners were more accurate in their reproduction of skip as opposed to step intervals when they marked a point of change in melodic direction. Fourthly, type of retention interval had a major effect on participants' performances. When tested with a 2AFC setup, the silence group performed best, when tested with a same/different setup, both the silence and nonsense syllable groups performed best. Results are discussed in reference to related STM studies using short tone sequences and Berz' (1995) working memory model for music.
Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006), 2017
In a continuous recognition paradigm, most stimuli elicit superior recognition performance when the item to be recognised is the most recent stimulus (a recency-in-memory effect). Furthermore, increasing the number of intervening items cumulatively disrupts memory in most domains. Memory for melodies composed in familiar tuning systems also shows superior recognition for the most recent melody, but no disruptive effects from the number of intervening melodies. A possible explanation has been offered in a novel regenerative multiple representations (RMR) conjecture. The RMR assumes that prior knowledge informs perception and perception influences memory representations. It postulates that melodies are perceived, thus also represented, simultaneously as integrated entities and also their components (such as pitches, pitch intervals, short phrases, and rhythm). Multiple representations of the melody components and melody as a whole can restore one another, thus providing resilience aga...
Memory and the Experience of Hearing Music
We report five experiments in which listeners heard the beginnings of classical minuets (or similar dances). The phrase in either measures 1-2 or measures 3-4 was selected as a target, tested at the end of the excerpt. A "beep" indicated the test item, which was a continuation of the minuet as written. Test items were targets (repetitions of the selected phrase), similar lures (imitations of targets), or different lures, and occurred after delays of 4-5, 15, or 30 s. We estimated the proportion of correct discriminations of targets from similar lures and targets from different lures. In Experiment 1, discrimination of targets from similar lures (but not of targets from different lures) improved between 5 and 15 s. Experiment 2 extended this result to a delay of 30 s. Discrimination of targets from similar lures improved over time, especially for second-phrase targets. This improvement was due mainly to decreasing false alarms to similar lures. Experiments 3 and 4 replaced the continuous music with silence and with a repetitive "oom-pah-pah" pattern, and the improvement in discrimination of targets from similar lures disappeared. Experiment 5 removed listeners' expectations of being tested, and the improvement also disappeared. Results are considered in the framework of current theories of memory, and their implications for the listener's experience of hearing music are discussed.
Expectations for tonal cadences: Sensory and cognitive priming effects
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2018
Studies examining the formation of melodic and harmonic expectations during music listening have repeatedly demonstrated that a tonal context primes listeners to expect certain (tonally related) continuations over others. However, few such studies have (1) selected stimuli using ready examples of expectancy violation derived from real-world instances of tonal music, (2) provided a consistent account for the influence of sensory and cognitive mechanisms on tonal expectancies by comparing different computational simulations, or (3) combined melodic and harmonic representations in modelling cognitive processes of expectation. To resolve these issues, this study measures expectations for the most recurrent cadence patterns associated with tonal music and then simulates the reported findings using three sensory–cognitive models of auditory expectation. In Experiment 1, participants provided explicit retrospective expectancy ratings both before and after hearing the target melodic tone an...
The American Journal of Psychology, 2011
We investigated the effect of level-of-processing manipulations on "remember" and "know" responses in episodic melody recognition (Experiments 1 and 2) and how this effect is modulated by item familiarity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants performed 2 conceptual and 2 perceptual orienting tasks while listening to familiar melodies: judging the mood, continuing the tune, tracing the pitch contour, and counting long notes. The conceptual mood task led to higher d' rates for "remember" but not "know" responses. In Experiment 2, participants either judged the mood or counted long notes of tunes with high and low familiarity. A level-of-processing effect emerged again in participants' "remember" d' rates regardless of melody familiarity. Results are discussed within the distinctive processing framework.
Music tonality and context-dependent recall: The influence of key change and mood mediation
European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 2007
Music in a minor key is often claimed to sound sad, whereas music in a major key is typically viewed as sounding cheerful. Such claims suggest that maintaining or switching the tonality of a musical selection between information encoding and retrieval should promote robust "mood-mediated" context-dependent memory (CDM) effects. The reported experiment examined this hypothesis using versions of a Chopin waltz where the key was either reinstated or switched at retrieval, so producing minor--minor, major--major, minor--major and major--minor conditions. Better word recall arose in reinstated-key conditions (particularly for the minor--minor group) than in switched-key conditions, supporting the existence of tonality-based CDM effects. The tonalities also induced different mood states. The minor key induced a more negative mood than the major key, and participants in switched-key conditions demonstrated switched moods between learning and recall. Despite the association between music tonality and mood, a path analysis failed to reveal a reliable mood-mediation effect.