Influence of Expressive Versus Mechanical Musical Performance on Short-term Memory for Musical Excerpts

Tillmann, Barbara; Dowling, W. Jay; Lalitte, Philippe; Molin, Paul; Schulze, Katrin; Poulin-Charronnat, Bénédicte; Schoen, D; Bigand, Emmanuel

doi:10.1525/mp.2013.30.4.419

Cited by 7 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Exact pitch intervals in music (Dowling, 1991;Dowling & Bartlett, 1981;Dowling et al, 1995) are increasingly bound to the underlying rhythm and contour structure over time, such that there is improvement in memory (or no forgetting) over the course of 15-120 s. The same phenomenon is observed with homophonic music (i.e., melody plus harmony; Dowling & Bartlett, 1981;Dowling & Tillmann, 2014;Dowling et al, 2001;Tillmann et al, 2013). Memory for exact words in poetry shows similar improvements, presumably because the words are increasingly bound to the underlying rhythm over time, which explains why the effect is not evident for prose (Tillmann & Dowling, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Schellenberg

Habashi

2015

Mem Cogn

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The identity of a melody is independent of surface features such as key (pitch level), tempo (speed), and timbre (musical instrument). We examined the duration of memory for melodies (tunes) and whether such memory is affected by changes in key, tempo, or timbre. After listening to previously unfamiliar melodies twice, participants provided recognition ratings for the same (old) melodies as well as for an equal number of new melodies. The delay between initial exposure and test was 10 min, 1 day, or 1 week. In Experiment 1, half of the old melodies were transposed by six semitones or shifted in tempo by 64 beats per minute. In Experiment 2, half of the old melodies were changed in timbre (piano to saxophone, or vice versa). In both experiments, listeners remembered the melodies, and there was no forgetting over the course of a week. Changing the key or tempo from exposure to test had a detrimental impact on recognition after 10 min and 1 day, but not after 1 week. Changing the timbre affected recognition negatively after all three delays. Mental representations of unfamiliar melodies appear to be consolidated after only two presentations. These representations include surface information unrelated to a melody's identity, although information about key and tempo fades at a faster rate than information about timbre.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Schellenberg

Habashi

2015

Mem Cogn

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“…ROC curves therefore deal more efficiently with response bias especially when there is some degree of uncertainty associated with the responses. This type of measure, taking explicitly into account the uncertainty that may be associated with the responses, is very frequently used in the musical STM literature (e.g., Dewar, Cuddy, & Mewhort, 1977;Dowling & Tillmann, 2014;Halpern, Bartlett, & Dowling, 1995;Tillmann et al, 2013).…”

Section: Data and Statistical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the recognition phase, participants heard again the sequence of beat sounds which had the same temporal organisation as in the target sequence and a probe tone was played at one of the six serial positions; the probe was always a tone that had been presented in the target sequence. The participants were required to covertly recall the target sequence in time with the beat sequence and to make a same/different judgment relative to the position of the probe tone in the target sequence by pressing one of the six response buttons representing different levels of confidence (1 = very sure same, 2 = sure same, 3 = same, 4 = different, 5 = sure different, 6 = very sure different), as used in previous experiments on musical STM (e.g., Dowling & Tillmann, 2014;Tillmann et al, 2013). For more details about our motivation to use levels of confidence, see the Data and statistical analyses section.…”

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confidence: 99%

Temporal grouping effects in musical short-term memory

Gorin

Mengal

Majerus

2017

Memory

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Recent theoretical accounts of verbal and visuo-spatial short-term memory (STM) have proposed the existence of domain-general mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order information. These accounts are based on the observation of similar behavioural effects across several modalities, such as temporal grouping effects. Across two experiments, the present study aimed at extending these findings, by exploring a STM modality that has received little interest so far, STM for musical information. Given its inherent rhythmic, temporal and serial organisation, the musical domain is of interest for investigating serial order STM processes such as temporal grouping. In Experiment 1, the data did not allow to determine the presence or the absence of temporal grouping effects. In Experiment 2, we observed that temporal grouping of tone sequences during encoding improves short-term recognition for serially presented probe tones. Furthermore, the serial position curves included microprimacy and micro-recency effects, which are the hallmark characteristic of temporal grouping. Our results suggest that the encoding of serial order information in musical STM may be supported by temporal positional coding mechanisms similar to those reported in the verbal domain.Keywords: serial order, working memory, music and language, domain-general, rhythm IntroductionIn his influential paper, Lashley (1951) considered the capacity of the brain to process serial order information as one of the most complex types of human behaviour. This ability is involved in a wide range of human activities, such as speech perception (Grossberg, 2003) and production (Dell, 1986;Dell, Burger, & Svec, 1997;MacKay, 1970) and musical performance (Mathias, Pfordresher, & Palmer, 2015;Palmer & Pfordresher, 2003;Pfordresher, Palmer, & Jungers, 2007). Ironically, while Lashley (1951) illustrated the problem of serial order in behaviour with the case of serial order constraints that musicians have to deal with during musical performance, only little attention has been paid to serial order processing in the musical domain (but see . Serial ordering capacities have been extensively studied in the verbal domain, particularly in the context of verbal short-term memory (STM) tasks. In the verbal STM domain, a variable that has been observed to have a major impact on serial order processing is the effect of temporal grouping. The manipulation of the temporal grouping of memoranda has been shown to lead to generally improved recall accuracy relative to ungrouped memoranda and to a specific shape of the serial position curve characterised by intra-group primacy and recency effects (Farrell & Lewandowsky, 2004;Hartley, Hurlstone, & Hitch, 2016;Henson, 1996Henson, , 1999Hurlstone & Hitch, 2015;Ng & Maybery, 2002, 2005Parmentier, Andrés, Elford, & Jones, 2006;Parmentier, Maybery, & Jones, 2004;Ryan, 1969aRyan, , 1969b. The present study aimed at furthering our understanding of serial order STM for auditory material, by investigating the impact of temporal grouping manipulati...

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“…The finding of a reliable differentiation between degree of perceived tension in modulation to step 7 and to step 5 for the real music excerpts, but not for the plain harmonic progressions, corroborated the results of the previous study by Thompson and Cuddy (1997) that demonstrated that the listeners' responses to expressive performance corresponded more closely to theoretical predictions based on the circle of fifths than their responses to nonexpressive performance. This advantage for real music excerpts might be related to a better short-term memory for expressively performed music (Tillmann, Dowling, Philippe, Molin, Schulze, Poulin-Charronnat, Schoen, & Bigand, 2013). It is possible that the richer artistic contents in the real music excerpts enhanced the memorization of preceding tonal information by generating a greater emotional response (Chapin, Jantzen, Scott Kelso, Steinberg, & Large, 2010;Vieillard, Roy, & Peretz, 2012), which amplifies the intuitive comparison between the opening and the concluding tonalities in modulation.…”

Section: Several Of Our Findings Confirmed Previous Investigations Inmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional processing in music: Study in affective responses to tonal modulation in controlled harmonic progressions and real music.

Korsakova-Kreyn¹,

Dowling²

2014

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain

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Tonal modulation is one of the main structural and expressive aspects of music in the European musical tradition. Experiment 1 investigated affective responses to modulations to all eleven major and minor keys (relative to the starting tonality) in brief, specially constructed harmonic progressions, by using six bipolar scales related to valence, potency, and synaesthesia. The results indicated the dependence of affective response on degree of modulation in terms of key proximity, and of mode. Experiment 2 examined affective responses to the most common modulations in nineteenth-century piano music: to the subdominant, dominant, and minor sixth in the major mode. The stimuli were a balanced set of both harmonic progressions (as in Experiment 1) and real music excerpts. The results agreed with theoretical models of violations of expectancy and of proximity based on the circle of fifths, and demonstrated the influence of melodic direction and musical style on emotional response to tonal modulation.

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Influence of Expressive Versus Mechanical Musical Performance on Short-term Memory for Musical Excerpts

Abstract: , et al.. Influence of expressive versus mechanical musical performance on short-term memory for musical excerpts.

Cited by 7 publications

References 22 publications

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Remembering the melody and timbre, forgetting the key and tempo

Temporal grouping effects in musical short-term memory

Emotional processing in music: Study in affective responses to tonal modulation in controlled harmonic progressions and real music.

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