Listeners are adept at extracting regularities from the environment, a process known as statistical learning (SL). SL has been generally assumed to be a form of “context-free” learning that occurs independently of prior knowledge, and SL experiments typically involve exposing participants to presumed novel regularities, such as repeating nonsense words. However, recent work has called this assumption into question, demonstrating that learners’ previous language experience can considerably influence SL performance. In the present experiment, we tested whether previous knowledge also shapes SL in a non-linguistic domain, using a paradigm that involves extracting regularities over tone sequences. Participants learned novel tone sequences, which consisted of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. For one group of participants, the tone sequences used artificial, computerized instrument sounds. For the other group, the same tone sequences used familiar instrument sounds (piano or violin). Knowledge of the statistical regularities was assessed using both trained sounds (measuring specific learning) and sounds that differed in pitch range and/or instrument (measuring transfer learning). In a follow-up experiment, two additional testing sessions were administered to gauge retention of learning (one day and approximately one-week post-training). Compared to artificial instruments, training on sequences played by familiar instruments resulted in reduced correlations among test items, reflecting more idiosyncratic performance. Across all three testing sessions, learning of novel regularities presented with familiar instruments was worse compared to unfamiliar instruments, suggesting that prior exposure to music produced by familiar instruments interfered with new sequence learning. Overall, these results demonstrate that real-world experience influences SL in a non-linguistic domain, supporting the view that SL involves the continuous updating of existing representations, rather than the establishment of entirely novel ones.
Listening to music is an enjoyable activity for most individuals, yet the musical factors that relate to aesthetic experiences are not completely understood. In the present paper, we investigate whether the absolute tuning of music implicitly influences listener evaluations of music, as well as whether listeners can explicitly categorize musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” based on conventional tuning standards. In Experiment 1, participants rated unfamiliar musical excerpts, which were either tuned conventionally or unconventionally, in terms of liking, interest, and unusualness. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to explicitly judge whether several types of musical sounds (isolated notes, chords, scales, and short excerpts) were “in tune” or “out of tune.” The results suggest that the absolute tuning of music has no influence on listener evaluations of music (Experiment 1), and these null results are likely caused, in part, by an inability for listeners to explicitly differentiate in-tune from out-of-tune musical excerpts (Experiment 2). Interestingly, listeners in Experiment 2 showed robust above-chance performance in classifying musical sounds as “in tune” versus “out of tune” when the to-be-judged sounds did not contain relative pitch changes (i.e., isolated notes and chords), replicating prior work on absolute intonation for simple sounds. Taken together, the results suggest that most listeners possess some form of absolute intonation, but this ability has limited generalizability to more ecologically valid musical contexts and does not appear to influence aesthetic judgments of music.
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