M ANY PEOPLE CLAIM TO HAVE DIFFICULTIES INsinging, and are uncomfortable when they have to sing at public gatherings, such as birthday parties or holiday celebrations. For instance, in a sample of 1,105 university students taking an introductory psychology course, 59% indicated that they could not imitate melodies by singing (prescreening questionnaire data, University of Texas at San Antonio, December 13,

People produce long sequences such as speech and music with incremental planning: mental preparation of a subset of sequence events. The authors model in music performance the sequence events that can be retrieved and prepared during production. Events are encoded in terms of their serial order and timing relative to other events in a planning increment, a contextually determined distribution of event activations. Planning is facilitated by events' metrical similarity and serial/temporal proximity and by developmental changes in short-term memory. The model's predictions of larger planning increments as production rate decreases and as producers' age-experience increases are confirmed in serial-ordering errors produced by adults and children. Incremental planning is considered as a general retrieval constraint in serially ordered behaviors.

A sizable literature on the neuroimaging of speech production has reliably shown activations in the orofacial region of the primary motor cortex. These activations have invariably been interpreted as reflecting “mouth” functioning and thus articulation. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare an overt speech task with tongue movement, lip movement, and vowel phonation. The results showed that the strongest motor activation for speech was the somatotopic larynx area of the motor cortex, thus reflecting the significant contribution of phonation to speech production. In order to analyze further the phonatory component of speech, we performed a voxel-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of syllable-singing (11 studies) and compared the results with a previously-published meta-analysis of oral reading (11 studies), showing again a strong overlap in the larynx motor area. Overall, these findings highlight the under-recognized presence of phonation in imaging studies of speech production, and support the role of the larynx motor cortex in mediating the “melodicity” of speech.

Individuals differ markedly with respect to how well they can imitate pitch through singing and in their ability to perceive pitch differences. We explored whether the use of pitch in one's native language can account for some of the differences in these abilities. Results from two studies suggest that individuals whose native language is a tone language, in which pitch contributes to word meaning, are better able to imitate (through singing) and perceptually discriminate musical pitch. These findings support the view that language acquisition fine-tunes the processing of critical auditory dimensions in the speech signal and that this fine-tuning can be carried over into nonlinguistic domains.

There has been a recent surge of research on the topic of poor-pitch singing. However, this research has not addressed an important distinction in measurement: that between accuracy and precision. With respect to singing, accuracy refers to the average difference between sung and target pitches. Precision, by contrast, refers to the consistency of repeated attempts to produce a pitch. A group of 45 non-musician participants was asked to vocally imitate unfamiliar 5-note melodies, as well as to sing a series of familiar melodies from memory (e.g., Happy Birthday). The results showed that singers were more accurate than they were precise, and that a majority of participants could justifiably be categorized as imprecise singers. Accuracy and precision measures were correlated with one another, and conditional-probability analyses suggested that accuracy predicted precision more so than the converse. Finally, performance differences across groups of singers were greater for the imitation of unfamiliar tone sequences than for the recall of familiar melodies.

Five experiments explored whether fluency in musical sequence production relies on matches between the contents of auditory feedback and the planned outcomes of actions. Participants performed short melodies from memory on a keyboard while musical pitches that sounded in synchrony with each keypress (feedback contents) were altered. Results indicated that altering pitch contents can disrupt production, but only when altered pitches form a sequence that is structurally similar to the planned sequence. These experiments also addressed the role of musical skill: Experiments 1 and 3 included trained pianists; other experiments included participants with little or no musical training. Results were similar across both groups with respect to the disruptive effects of auditory feedback manipulations. These results support the idea that a common hierarchical representation guides sequences of actions and the perception of event sequences and that this coordination is not acquired from learned associations formed by musical skill acquisition.

Four experiments examined temporal relationships between actions and auditory feedback in music performance. Experiment 1 incorporated phase shifts of feedback, which disrupted produced timing but not overall accuracy. Experiment 2 incorporated period shifts of pitch contents for synchronized feedback that primarily disrupted accuracy more than timing. Experiment 3 incorporated combined phase and period shifts, which caused moderate disruption to timing and accuracy and revealed interactive effects of period and phase shifts on production. A 4th experiment included all feedback conditions in the same session to confirm differences across Experiments 1-3. These results are consistent with the view that actions and their perceptual consequences are coordinated in a way that distinguishes timing (phase shifts) from sequencing (period shifts).

Three experiments were performed to explore the effects of mismatches between actions (key-presses) and the contents of auditory feedback (pitch events) during music performance. Pianists performed melodies from memory during altered auditory feedback that was synchronized with key-presses but matched the pitch of other sequence events. Feedback direction was manipulated by presenting pitches that matched events intended for the past (delays; Experiments 1 and 3) or the future (prelays; Experiments 2 and 3). Feedback distance was manipulated by varying the absolute separation between the current event and the location of the feedback pitch. All alterations disrupted the accuracy of performance (pitch errors) more so than timing. Serial-ordering errors indicated confusions among proximal and metrically similar events, consistent with the predictions of an incremental planning model (Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003). Patterns of serial-ordering errors suggested that performers compensate for the disruptive effects of altered feedback by changing event activations during planning.