Melody recognition revisited: influence of melodic Gestalt on the encoding of relational pitch information. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
Melodic contour, the shape of a melody without reference to the individual notes, is important in the cognition of short, unfamiliar melodies. Melodic contour has generally been conceived as specifically the direction of pitch intervals (i.e., up or down). It is argued that the magnitude of the pitch intervals (i.e., step or leap) is also encoded as part of relative pitch memory for melodies. It was hypothesised that participants are sensitive to changes in pitch interval magnitude (PIM) in a discrimination task using transposed melodies. It was also hypothesized that PIM is encoded in relative pitch memory for melodies as part of melodic contour. The results indicate that participants are sensitive to changes in pitch interval magnitude, but does not support the hypothesis that PIM is encoded as part of melodic contour. Instead, the results of the experiment suggest that the effect of on contour discrimination appears to arise from melodic expectations..
What makes a melody: The perceptual singularity of pitch sequences
The Journal of the Acoustical …, 2009
This study investigated the ability of normal-hearing listeners to process random sequences of tones varying in either pitch or loudness. Same/different judgments were collected for pairs of sequences with a variable length ͑up to eight elements͒ and built from only two different elements, which were 200-ms harmonic complex tones. The two possible elements of all sequences had a fixed level of discriminability, corresponding to a dЈ value of about 2, irrespective of the auditory dimension ͑pitch or loudness͒ along which they differed. This made it possible to assess sequence processing per se, independent of the accuracy of sound encoding. Pitch sequences were found to be processed more effectively than loudness sequences. However, that was the case only when the sequence elements included low-rank harmonics, which could be at least partially resolved in the auditory periphery. The effect of roving and transposition was also investigated. These manipulations reduced overall performance, especially transposition, but an advantage for pitch sequences was still observed. These results suggest that automatic frequency-shift detectors, available for pitch sequences but not loudness sequences, participate in the effective encoding of melodies.
The influence of melodic context on pitch recognition jdugment
1982
Subjects made delayed pitch comparisons between tones that were each preceded by tones of lower pitch. The pitches of these preceding tones were so chosen that in some conditions the melodic intervals formed by the standard {S) and comparison {C} combinations were identical, and in others they differed. A strong effect of melodic relational context was demonstrated. When the $ and C combinations formed identical melodic intervals, there was an increased tendency for the S and C tones to be judged as identical. And when the S and C combinations formed different melodic intervals, there was an increased tendency for the S and C tones to be judged as different. These effects occurred both when the S and C tones were identical in pitch and also when these differed, and they occurred despite instructions to attend only to the S and C tones.
The influence of melodic context on pitch recognition judgment
1982
Subjects made delayed pitch comparisons between tones that were each preceded by tones of lower pitch. The pitches of these preceding tones were so chosen that in some conditions the melodic intervals formed by the standard (S) and comparison (C) combinations were identical,and in others they differed. A strong effect of melodic relational context was demonstrated. When the S and C combinations formed identical melodic intervals, there was an increased tendency for the S and C tones to be judged as identical. And when the S and C combinations formed different melodic intervals, there was an increased tendency for the S and C tones to be judged as different. These effects occurred both when the S and C tones were identical in pitch and also when these differed, and they occurred despite instructions to attend only to the S and C tones.
Listeners perceive complex pitch-temporal structure in melodies
Memory & Cognition
In typical Western music, important pitches occur disproportionately often on important beats, referred to as the tonal-metric hierarchy (Prince & Schmuckler, 2014, Music Perception, 31, 254-270). We tested whether listeners are sensitive to this alignment of pitch and temporal structure. In Experiment 1, the stimuli were 200 artificial melodies with random pitch contours; all melodies had both a regular beat and a pitch class distribution that favored one musical key, but had either high or low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Thirty-two listeners rated the goodness of each melody, and another 41 listeners rated the melodies' metric clarity (how clear the beat was). The tonal-metric hierarchy did not affect either rating type, likely because the melodies may have only weakly (at best) established a musical key. In Experiment 2, we shuffled the pitches in 60 composed melodies (scrambling pitch contour, but not rhythm) to generate versions with high and low agreement with the tonal-metric hierarchy. Both ratings of goodness (N = 40) and metric clarity (N = 40) revealed strong evidence of the tonal-metric hierarchy influencing ratings; there was no effect of musical training. In Experiment 3, we phase-shifted, rather than shuffled, the pitches from the composed melodies, thus preserving pitch contour. Both rating types (goodness N = 43, metric clarity N = 32) replicated the results of Experiment 2. These findings establish the psychological reality of the tonal-metric hierarchy.
Musical Training Enhances Automatic Encoding of Melodic Contour and Interval Structure
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2004
In music, melodic information is thought to be encoded in two forms, a contour code (up/down pattern of pitch changes) and an interval code (pitch distances between successive notes). A recent study recording the mismatch negativity (MMN) evoked by pitch contour and interval deviations in simple melodies demonstrated that people with no formal music education process both contour and interval information in the auditory cortex automatically. However, it is still unclear whether musical experience enhances both strategies of melodic encoding. We designed stimuli to examine contour and interval information separately. In the contour condition there were eight different standard melodies (presented on 80% of trials), each consisting of five notes all ascending in pitch, and the corresponding deviant melodies (20%) were altered to descending on their final note. The interval condition used one five-note standard melody transposed to eight keys from trial to trial, and on deviant trials ...
Effects of Metrical Encoding on Melody Recognition
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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.
Relative pitch processing Comparing musical intervals to lexical tones
Humans use time-varying pitch patterns to convey information in music and speech. Recognition of musical melodies and lexical tones relies on relative pitch (RP), the ability to identify intervals between two pitches. RP processing in music is usually more fine-grained than that in tonal languages. In Western music, there are twelve pitch categories within an octave, whereas there are only three level (non-glide) lexical tones in Taiwanese (or Taiwanese Hokkien, a tonal language). The present study aimed at comparing the neural substrates underlying RP processing of musical melodic intervals with that of level lexical tones in Taiwanese. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data from fourteen participants with good RP were analyzed. The results showed that imagining the sounds of visually presented musical intervals was associated with enhanced activity in the central subregion of the right dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), right posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and right dorsal precuneus compared to auditory imagery of visually presented Taiwanese bi-character words with level lexical tones. During the sound-congruence-judgement task (auditory imagery of musical intervals or bi-character words, and subsequently judging if the imagined sounds were melodically congruent with heard sounds), the contrast of the musical minus linguistic conditions yielded activity in the bilateral dPMC-PPC network and dorsal precuneus, with the dPMC activated in the rostral subregion. The central dPMC and PPC may mediate the attention-based maintenance of pitch intervals, whereas the dorsal precuneus may support attention control and the spatial/sensorimotor processing of the fine-grained pitch structures of music. When judging the congruence between the imagined and heard musical intervals, the bilateral rostral dPMC may play a role in attention control, working memory, evaluation of motor activities, and monitoring mechanisms. Based on the findings of this study and recent studies of amusia, we suggest that higher order cognitive operations are critical to the more fine-grained pitch processing of musical melodies compared to lexical tones.
Absolute pitch judgments of familiar melodies generalize across timbre and octave
Most listeners can determine when a familiar recording of music has been shifted in musical key by as little as one semitone (e.g., from B to C major). However, it is unclear how this form of pitch memory relates to absolute pitch (AP) representations, which are based on pitch chroma. This is because listeners could use spectral cues from the familiar instrumentation of the original recordings or strategies based on pitch height (e.g., relying on a feeling that an incorrect recording sounds “too high” or “too low”) to determine when a familiar recording has been shifted in pitch. Neither of these strategies would require the kind of understanding of pitch chroma or musical key associated with AP. The present experiments thus assessed whether listeners could make accurate absolute pitch judgments when listening to novel renditions of these familiar melodies, differing from the iconic recording in complexity and timbre (Experiment 1) or timbre and octave (Experiment 2). These experime...