The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of blocked and random practice schedules on the performance accuracy, speed, temporal evenness, and attitude of beginning band students in a group instructional setting. The research assumptions were based on the contextual interference hypothesis, which predicts that a blocked practice order (low contextual interference) leads to superior performance immediately following practice but that a random practice order (high contextual interference) supports superior performance at delayed retention testing. Beginning clarinet students ( N = 41) completed three practice sessions and one retention testing session, performing three seven-pitch exercises. At the end of practice, no significant differences were found between blocked and random practice groups for accuracy, speed, or temporal evenness. At retention, the random group performed significantly faster than the blocked group, F(1, 38) = 24.953, p < .001, η2 = .92, and the blocked group performed significantly slower than it did at the end of practice ( p < .001). No significant differences were found between groups for transfer tasks or for attitude toward practice.
This study explored the role of culture in shaping music perception and memory. We tested the hypothesis that listeners demonstrate different patterns of activation associated with music processing-particularly right frontal cortex-when encoding and retrieving culturally familiar and unfamiliar stimuli, with the latter evoking broader activation consistent with more complex memory tasks. Subjects (n = 16) were right-handed adults born and raised in the USA (n = 8) or Turkey (n = 8) with minimal music training. Using fMRI procedures, we scanned subjects during two tasks: (i) listening to novel musical examples from their own culture and an unfamiliar culture and (ii) identifying which among a series of brief excerpts were taken from the longer examples. Both groups were more successful remembering music of their home culture. We found greater activation for culturally unfamiliar music listening in the left cerebellar region, right angular gyrus, posterior precuneus and right middle frontal area extending into the inferior frontal cortex. Subjects demonstrated greater activation in the cingulate gyrus and right lingual gyrus when engaged in recall of culturally unfamiliar music. This study provides evidence for the influence of culture on music perception and memory performance at both a behavioral and neurological level.
The purpose of this study was to examine the motor learning construct of focus of attention in the context of playing a woodwind instrument. In an internal focus condition, a musician attends to a physical part of the body; in an external focus condition, a musician attends to an aspect of performance not attached to the body, such as the performance outcome of sound. Novice (n ϭ 15) and experienced (n ϭ 15) college woodwind players played 120 trials of alternating note sequences on an MIDI wind controller during a 2-day protocol. Twenty practice trials were performed for each of the following conditions: control (no focus of attention), internal (fingers), near-external (keys), and far-external (sound). Each focus condition was followed by 5 retention and 5 transfer trials. On Day 2, 5 retention and 5 transfer trials were performed in each condition. Trials were scored for pitch accuracy, evenness, and volume. On Day 1, the transfer task was performed more evenly and accurately by the novices, and more accurately by the experienced players, compared to the practice task (p Ͻ .05). This may reflect the difference in fingering sequence between the 2 tasks. On Day 2, a trend was found for both participant groups playing more pitch errors as the focus of attention became more distal, although this result was not significant. Volume was most consistent for the experienced players in the internal focus condition, whereas this condition was least effective for novice players.
The authors replicate and extend findings from previous studies of music enculturation by comparing music memory performance of children to that of adults when listening to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music. Forty-three children and 50 adults, all born and raised in the United States, completed a music memory test comprising unfamiliar excerpts of Western and Turkish classical music. Examples were selected at two levels of difficulty—simple and complex—based on texture, instrument variety, presence of simultaneous musical lines, and clarity of internal repetition. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their own culture than from an unfamiliar culture. Simple examples from both cultures were remembered significantly better than complex examples. Children performed as well as adults when remembering simple music from both cultures, whereas adults were better at remembering complex Western music. The results provide evidence that enculturation affects one's understanding of music structure before adulthood.
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