Innateness, Experience, and Music Perception

Abstract

Musical acculturation from infancy to adulthood was studied by testing the abilities of Western 6-month-olds and adults to notice mistunings in melodies based on native Western major, native Western minor, and non-native Javanese pelog scales. Results indicated that infants were similarly able to perceive native and non-native scales. Adults, however, were generally better perceivers of native than non-native scales. These findings suggest that infants are born with an equipotentiality for the perception of scales from a variety of cultures and that subsequent culturally specific experience substantially influences music perception.

Metrical Categories in Infancy and Adulthood

“…In the music domain, infants outperform adults on the detection of mistunings in unfamiliar musical scales (Lynch & Eilers, 1992;Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990;Trehub, Schellenberg, & Kamenetsky, 1999), and on the detection of pitch changes that preserve implied harmony (Trainor & Trehub, 1994). Such findings suggest perceptual reorganization that results from culture-specific experience.…”

A Spectral Pitch Class Model of the Probe Tone Data and Scalic Tonality

“…We might hypothesize that, given a collection of pitches in shortterm memory, we are able to mentally ''calculate'' or ''feel'' the sensory fit of any current pitch or chord each time it occurs. However, even if bottom-up processes play an important role, it would be implausible to dismiss the impact of long-term memory (the importance of long-term memory has been established in numerous music perception experiments such as Francès, 1988;Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990;Trehub, Schellenberg, & Kamenetsky, 1999). For instance, it is likely that certain scales (e.g., the diatonic and harmonic minor) are so commonly used that we learn where the best fitting chords are without having to mentally assess their sensory fit each time.…”

Effects of harmonics on relative pitch discrimination in a musical context

“…First, it provides a way to maintain a strong, constant musical context. Second, although it was initially developed as an infant methodology, it has proved to be useful with adults in comparing the ease of detecting changes across different conditions (Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990;Schellenberg & Trehub, 1994a;Trainor & Trehub, 1992, 1993a, 1993b, 1994.…”