Memory for melody and key in childhood

Abstract

After only two exposures to previously unfamiliar melodies, adults remember the tunes for over a week and the key for over a day. Here, we examined the development of long-term memory for melody and key. Listeners in three age groups (7- to 8-year-olds, 9- to 11-year-olds, and adults) heard two presentations of each of 12 unfamiliar melodies. After a 10-min delay, they heard the same 12 old melodies intermixed with 12 new melodies. Half of the old melodies were transposed up or down by six semitones from initial exposure. Listeners rated how well they recognized the melodies from the exposure phase. Recognition was better for old than for new melodies, for adults compared to children, and for older compared to younger children. Recognition ratings were also higher for old melodies presented in the same key at test as exposure, and the detrimental effect of the transposition affected all age groups similarly. Although memory for melody improves with age and exposure to music, implicit memory for key appears to be adult-like by 7 years of age.

Change detection of auditory tonal patterns defined by absolute versus relative pitch information. A combined behavioural and EEG study

“…This clearly shows that, when explicitly relevant, invariant patterns can be extracted and discriminated from each other despite variable absolute pitch. This is in line with other findings that non-musicians adeptly recognise transposed melodies [ 7 – 9 , 30 , 31 , 85 ]. There were some inter-individual differences, but the largest portion of performance variance was explained by whether absolute or relative pitch cues had to be extracted.…”

“…Thus, although true pattern changes were explicitly relevant and transpositions explicitly irrelevant, there is a clear performance advantage of absolute over relative pitch information in pattern discrimination. Similar advantageous effects of absolute pitch (same key) over relative pitch (different key) in melody recognition tasks have been reported [ 7 – 9 , 30 , 31 , 85 ]. This indicates that relevance alone does not provide a sufficient explanation for the P3a effects reported by Bader et al [ 17 ], and implies that there are more fundamental differences in the processing of absolute and relative patterns.…”

“…Nonetheless, it should not be neglected that the comparison of new patterns arguably is computationally more complex when reliant on relative compared to absolute pitch information, as it is not sufficient to compare whether two pitches are the same but rather whether their relative distance is. For instance, it was found that previously heard melodies that were in the same key at exposure and test were recognized with greater accuracy than melodies that were transposed [ 30 – 33 ], and that the ability to process relative pitch information depends on experience [ 30 , 32 , 34 – 37 ]. In our case, when absolute pitch information is available, any change in pitch is indication enough that the listener hears a new pattern.…”

Fine-grained Implicit Memory for Key and Tempo

“…It is also unknown whether tempo changes smaller than 15–20% could impair melody recognition. In previous research, moreover, novel melodies were very short in duration (i.e., 4–10 s; Halpern & Müllensiefen, 2008; Kleinsmith & Neill, 2018), or longer but with a simple structure (AA’BA’—Schellenberg et al, 2014; Schellenberg & Habashi, 2015; AA’—Schellenberg et al, 2017), and much repetition within each melody. Thus, it is an open question whether previous findings would generalize broadly.…”

“…Accounting for variance due to music training also allowed us to increase power to detect differences in recognition due to our stimulus manipulations. We doubted, however, that formal training in music would have an association with implicit memory for key or tempo because of the null developmental findings (Schellenberg et al, 2017), and because individual differences play a negligible role in other tests of implicit musical knowledge (Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006).…”