No abstract

The notion that the melody (i.e., pitch structure) of familiar music is more recognizable than its accompanying rhythm (i.e., temporal structure) was examined with the same set of nameable musical excerpts in three experiments. In Experiment 1,the excerpts were modified so as to keep either their original pitch variations, whereas durations were set to isochrony (melodic condition) or their original temporal pattern while played on a single constant pitch (rhythmic condition). The subjects, who were selected without regard to musical training, were found to name more tunes and to rate their feeling of knowing the musical excerpts far higher in the melodic condition than in the rhythmic condition. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, wherein the melodic and rhythmic patterns ofthe musical excerpts were interchanged to create chimeric mismatched tunes. The difference in saliency of the melodic pattern and the rhythmic pattern also emerged with a music-title-verification task in Experiment 3, hence discarding response selection as the main source of the discrepancy. The lesser effectiveness of rhythmic structure appears to be related to its lesser encoding distinctiveness relative to melodic structure. In general, rhythm was found to be a poor cue for the musical representations that are stored in long-term memory. Nevertheless, in all three experiments, the most effective cue for music identification involved the proper combination of pitches and durations. Therefore, the optimal code of access to long-term memory for music resides in a combination of rhythm and melody, of which the latter would be the most informative.Recognition of familiar music is immediate and easy for everyone. Despite this apparent effortlessness, music recognition is a complex procedure that recruits multiple processing components. At the very least, recognition of a familiar piece of music entails a mapping procedure between the sensory input and a stored long-term representation that captures some of the invariant properties of the music. These long-term representations are assumed to be stored in a network that contains all the specific musical pieces to which one has been exposed during her/his lifetime. Given the size and variety of this network, it is essential to specify the nature of the sensory code that is used by the mapping procedure to select a particular stored representation.There are a large number of sensory cues that can, in principle, serve as the entry code(s) to the network. Among these, the cues that arise from sequential variations along the pitch and the temporal dimension are apparently the most determinant. We will refer to these two classes of information with the generic terms melody and rhythm, as defined by pitch and temporal variations, respectively.