Children's perception of melodies: The role of contour, frequency, and rate of presentation

Morrongiello, Barbara A.; Trehub, Sandra E.; Thorpe, Leigh A.; Capodilupo, Sandra

doi:10.1016/0022-0965(85)90090-6

Cited by 41 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…By contrast, they find it more difficult to detect a comparison melody if it is the same as the standard but presented in a different key (i.e., simply transposed upward or downward in pitch) or if it has the same contour but different intervals between tones. Similar processing styles are evident among children 4 to 6 years of age, who find contour-violating changes to a melody much easier to detect than contour-preserving changes (Morrongiello, Trehub, Thorpe, & Capodilupo, 1985;Pick et al, 1988). After hearing a melody for the first time, even adults are more likely to remember its contour than its exact intervals or pitch levels (Bartlett & Dowling, 1980;Dowling, 1978).…”

Section: Developmental Changesmentioning

confidence: 70%

Expectancy in melody: Tests of children and adults.

Schellenberg¹,

Adachi²,

Purdy³

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Melodic expectancies among children and adults were examined. In Experiment 1, adults, 11-year-olds, and 8-year-olds rated how well individual test tones continued fragments of melodies. In Experiment 2, 11-, 8-, and 5-year-olds sang continuations to 2-tone stimuli. Response patterns were analyzed using 2 models of melodic expectancy. Despite having fewer predictor variables, the 2-factor model (E. G. Schellenberg, 1997) equaled or surpassed the implication-realization model (E. Narmour, 1990) in predictive accuracy. Listeners of all ages expected the next tone in a melody to be proximate in pitch to the tone heard most recently. Older listeners also expected reversals of pitch direction, specifically for tones that changed direction after a disruption of proximity and for tones that formed symmetric patterns.

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Section: Developmental Changesmentioning

confidence: 70%

Expectancy in melody: Tests of children and adults.

Schellenberg¹,

Adachi²,

Purdy³

et al. 2002

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…Child and adult listeners confuse short musical sequences that have similar contours but that differ in actual interval relations (Dowling, 1982;Morrongiello, Trehub, Thorpe, & Capodilupo, 1985).…”

Section: Macrocontourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of uncertainty on melodic

Cohen

Trehub

Thorpe

1989

Perception & Psychophysics

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In three experiments, musically trained and untrained adults listened to three repetitions of a 5-note melodic sequence followed by a final melody with either the same tune as those preceding it or differing in one position by one semitone. In Experiment 1, ability to recognize the final sequence was examined as a function of redundancy at the levels of musical structure in a sequence, contour complexity of transpositions in a trial, and trial context in a session. Within a sequence, tones were related as the major or augmented triad; within a trial, the four sequences began on successively higher notes (simple macrocontour) or on randomly selected notes (complex macrocontour); and within a session, trials were either blocked (all major or all augmented) or mixed (major and augmented randomly selected). Performance was superior for major melodies, for systematic transpositions within a trial (simple macrocontours), for blocked trials, and for musically trained listeners. In Experiment 2, we examined further the effect of macrocontour. Performance on simple macrocontours exceeded that on complex, and excluded the possibility that repetition of the 20-note sequences provided the entire benefit of systematic transposition in Experiment 1. The effect of musical structure (major/augmented) was also replicated. In Experiment 3, listeners provided structure ratings of ascending 20-note sequences from Experiment 2. Ratings on same trials were higher than those on corresponding different trials, in contrast to performance scores for augmented same and different trials in previous experiments. The concept of functional uncertainty was proposed to account for recognition difficulties on augmented same trials. The significant effects of redundancy on all the levels examined confirm the utility of the information-processing framework for the study of melodic sequence perception.In the present investigation, we examine the effect of uncertainty on melodic pattern processing. In particular, we aim to show that uncertainty at various levels of stimulus structure affects melodic processing. Interest in uncertainty originated in applications of information theory to perception and meaning (Gamer, 1962(Gamer, , 1974Haber, 1969;Underwood, 1979). According to this conceptualization, limited capacity or processing resources can be overcome by effective coding at various stages from sensation to perception and representation.The accuracy of encoding is thought to be affected by the physical properties of the stimulus and the experimental context. Because information requiring a simple code demands fewer processing resources than does information requiring a more complex code, complexity of the code predicts the accuracy of representation. According to Simon (1972), the complexity of a pattern can be defined by the number of symbols required to represent it. For example, a pattern with three identical elements (e.g.,

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“…If infants discriminated transpositions from the original melody, that would suggest that their representation included exact pitches, as would be the case for those musicians or children with "absolute" or "perfect" pitch (Ward & Bums, 1982). If infants failed to detect transpositions but could detect the other transformations, this would suggest that they encoded interval relations between notes, as adults and children do with familiar melodies (Bartlett & Dowling, 1980;Trehub, Morrongiello, & Thorpe, 1985). If infants failed to detect transpositions and contourpreserving transformations but succeeded in detecting contour-violating transformations, this would imply that they coded contour, as adults and children do with unfamiliar melodies (Dowling, 1978;Morrongiello, Trehub, Thorpe, & Capodilupo, 1985).…”

Section: Melodic Processing: Contourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not only can infants detect changes in contour that result from reordering four tones of a six-tone melody, they can also detect contour changes resulting from alterations of a single component tone in any serial position (Trehub, Thorpe, & Morrongiello, 1985). On the basis of these studies of contour discrimination, it would seem that, except in the case of very brief retention intervals, infants encode global information about a melody at the expense of local detail about specific pitches.…”

Section: Melodic Processing: Contourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the past few years, Trehub and her colleagues (Thorpe, 1985(Thorpe, , 1986Trehub, 1985;Trehub, Bull, & Thorpe, 1984;Trehub, Cohen, Thorpe, & Morrongiello, 1986;Trehub, Thorpe, & Morrongiello, 1985 have explored infants' ability to perceive various aspects of musical material that are significant in music in general and in Western European music in particular: contour, intervals, exact pitches, dia-…”

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confidence: 99%

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