Cognitive Melodic Perception (original) (raw)
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Development of a methodology and theoretical framework for melodic discrimination
1987
The psychology of music has the potential to make great contributions to knowledge of cognition in general because musical stimuli come from a natural and highly structured domain, (as do the linguistic stimuli normally used in cognitive research), and yet they lack the referential meaning of linguistic stimuli. This lack of reference by musical stimuli to entities outside the musical domain should make it easier to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms by which structured and patterned stimuli are manipulated than is the case with linguistic stimuli. Yet there is not a single result from the psychology of music that is generally regarded as illuminating basic cognitive mechanisms. The ability to discriminate two melodies as differing or identical is arguably the most basic musical task. I have concentrated on that task in this research. Modern research on melody discrimination dates from 1960 and yet the literature reporting that research is quite small with only a limited number of investigators. The effects and theoretical models reported have been specific to the musical domain with almost no appeal to any general cognitive mechanisms. I believe that because of this the field is seen as peripheral to the advance of cognition, very few researchers are attracted to it, and hence the rate of progress is low. In order to unlock the potential of the psychology of music this area of research must be tied back to general cognition. In my review of previous research I have identified the lack of a sophisticated theoretical framework and adequate experimental and data analytic methodologies as the key factors preventing rapid progress in this field. Therefore, the aim of my research has been threefold: to develop an adequate theoretical framework that will serve as a bridge from musical phenomena to concepts from general cognition; to develop sophisticated methods of data analysis that allow much more fine-grained analyses of data than are currently possible in order to investigate the proposed framework; and to conduct empirical investigations in order to explore the consequences of the framework, test the new data analyses, and to discover new, more subtle effects than those previously reported, to serve as the starting points for further investigation. The framework that I have proposed is based on the distinction between attributes describing a melody and the units in which those attributes are organised. This distinction is commonly acknowledged in models of cognitive representations and yet it has not been made at all in previous melody discrimination research. That research appears to have identified the attribute with the units, as exemplified by the assertion that "well-known melodies must be stored as sequences of pitch intervals between successive notes" (Dowling, 1978, p. 346). My framework makes it clear that the issue of what information is stored (attributes) can be investigated independently of the issue of how that information is organised in the representation (units). Another point which is made clear by my framework is the need for some mechanism to ensure that corresponding units are compared in the process of comparing the representations of two melodies. In my fourth experiment I discovered a pair of melodies in which non-corresponding units were compared. This problem of matching corresponding units for comparison is likely to exist in all cognitive domains. Thus this is an area in which the psychology of music could elucidate a general cognitive mechanism. In my review of the methodology used in melody discrimination research I found that there were characteristics of the melodic domain that made traditional means of analysis particularly inappropriate. There are marked differences in the psychological characteristics of individual melodies and there are also idiosyncratic interactions of subjects with melodies. Another previously unrecognised problem is that it is literally impossible to generate musical stimuli in such a way as to avoid confounding. I refer to this characteristic as obligatory confounding. These characteristics reduce the utility of traditional analyses which aggregate data over melodies and analyse them in terms of fixed orthogonal factors. However, the major problem with previous analyses is that they are carried out at the level of groups of melody pairs rather than at the single pair level. That is, measures of discriminability could not be derived for single pairs of melodies. Thus the discriminabilities could only be analysed and explained in terms of the summary properties of groups of melody pairs rather than the properties of individual melodies involved in individual judgments. I have developed an extension to signal detection analysis that allows the discriminability of individual melody pairs to be calculated. These discriminabilities can then be analysed and interpreted in terms of the characteristics of the particular melodies involved. Thus, I have developed a technique to allow melody discrimination phenomena to be examined at a far finer level of resolution than was previously possible. Using this technique I have demonstrated several previously unknown effects and the number of effects found appears to have been limited primarily by the quantity of data collected. In my first experiment I was attempting to find clues to the existence of previously unreported effects for further investigation in the subsequent experiments. The effect which I found and chose to pursue was the increased saliency of changes occurring at a contour reversal. This experiment also demonstrated effects related to the overall contour shape, a particular pitch transition, the pitch range, and cadence. The second and third experiments further investigated the contour reversal effect. This effect was convincingly demonstrated in these experiments while I developed my methods of data analysis. The third experiment also demonstrated effects associated with the repetition of a note across a contour reversal and with rhythmic stress. In my fourth experiment I used the methodology that I had developed to attack directly the question of the relative importance of interval-based and note-based attributes. This experiment demonstrated that simple measures of the number of notes and interval changed are inadequate to account for melody discrimination performance. I found effects related to repetition across a contour reversal, the tonic, the major triad, the unusuality of particular pitch transitions, and the process of matching of corresponding units. These effects were more naturally described in terms of note-based attributes than interval-based attributes. Thus, the research reported here has accomplished my original aims of developing a framework, developing a methodology, and demonstrating novel effects with that framework and methodology. However, the most important aspect of this work is that it provides a significant break from previous work and acts as a starting point from which to develop the area of melody discrimination research in the manner which it deserves.
An Alternative Postulate to see Melody as “Language”
2007
The paper proposes a way to see melodic features in music/songs in the terms of “letters” constituting “words”, while in return investigating the fulfillment of Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in them. Some interesting findings are reported including some possible conjectures for classification of melodic and musical artifacts considering several aspects of culture. The paper ends with some discussions related to further directions, be it enrichment in musicology and the possible plan for musical generative art.
Melody recognition entails the encoding of pitch intervals between successive notes. While it has been shown that a whole melodic sequence is better encoded than the sum of its constituent intervals, the underlying reasons have remained opaque. Here, we compared listeners' accuracy in encoding the relative pitch distance between two notes (for example, C, E) of an interval to listeners accuracy under the following three modifications: (1) doubling the duration of each note (C -E -), (2) repetition of each note (C, C, E, E), and (3) adding a preceding note (G, C, E). Repeating (2) or adding an extra note (3) improved encoding of relative pitch distance when the melodic sequences were transposed to other keys, but lengthening the duration (1) did not improve encoding relative to the standard two-note interval sequences. Crucially, encoding accuracy was higher with the four-note sequences than with long two-note sequences despite the fact that sensory (pitch) information was held constant. We interpret the results to show that re-forming the Gestalts of two-note intervals into two-note "melodies" results in more accurate encoding of relational pitch information due to a richer structural context in which to embed the interval.
MELODIC AND RHYTHMIC CONTOUR IN PERCEPTION AND MEMORY
As the Gestalt psychologists knew, and as William James and Christian Ehrenfels already saw in the 1890s, a melody is a prime example of an integrated whole in perception and memory. Changing any aspect of a melody--its pitches, rhythm, timbre, tempo, harmony, even its articulation--has an impact on how the other aspects are perceived and remembered. This does not mean that we can't analyze a melody in terms of its features. It just means we need to be cautious in drawing conclusions about the effects of those features, and be aware of the interactions operating among our variables. With that in mind we can arrive at a very good model of the relative contributions of the various analytic features of melodies.
Towards a Cognitive Model of Melodic Similarity
2001
In recent years the interest in melodic similarity has mushroomed mainly due to the increased importance of music information retrieval (MIR). A great number of similarity models and algorithms have been developed, but little or no attention has been paid to cognitive or perceptual aspects to the issue at hand. Questions, about the relevant parameters and the appropriate implementation are under-researched as are experimental data. This paper focuses on the pitch aspect of melodic similarity, scrutinising the term pitch replacing it by a less ambivalent and overused term, which we will call meloton. Based on the term meloton the paper suggests to approach the issue of ‘melotonic’ similarity from a transformational angle, where transformations are executed as reflections and translations. ‘Melotonic’ similarity then is seen as related to the transformation process in form of a transpositional and interval vector. Finally, melotonic similarity as portrait in a psychological context em...
2021
Many studies about musical meter have made a mistake that the target of research is exist in musical stimuli in its complete form. However, without human cognition, music is not yet music but merely physical difference of sounds. Therefore, the essence of music exits not in stimuli but in human cognition. This study postulate that human understands music by means of schemas as in cognitive sciences. Therefore, metrical structure of music can be regarded as the direct reflection of this schema, because for listner's easiness, composers and performer make music correspond to human cognitive schemas. Thus, we can extrapolate the nature of the schema by research of general characteristics of musical works. (This is a draft English translation of Chapter 1 from my dissertation in Japanese.)