Tonal strength and melody recognition after long and short delays

Abstract

In a continuous-ronning-memory task, subjects heard novel seven-note melodies that were tested after delays of 11 sec (empty) or 39 sec (filled). Test items were transposed to new pitch levels (to moderately distant keys in the musical sense) and included exact transpositions (targets), samecontour lures with altered pitch intervals, and new-contour lures. Melodies differed in tonal strength (degree of conformity to a musical key) and were tonally strong, tonally weak, or atonal. False alarms to same-contour lures decreased over the longer delay period, but only for tonal stimuli. In agreement with previous studies, discrimination of detailed changes in pitch intervals improved with increased delay, whereas discrimination of more global contour information declined, again only for tonal stimuli. These results suggest that poor short-delay performance in rejecting same-contour lures arises from confusion that is based on the similarity of tonality between standard stimuli and lures. If a test item has the same contour and a similar tonality to a just-presented item, subjects tend to accept it. After a delay filled with melodies in other tonalities, the salience of key information recedes, and subjects base their judgments on more detailed pattern information (namely, exact pitch intervals). The fact that tonality affects judgments of melodic contour indicates that contour is not an entirely separable feature of melodies but rather that a melody with its contour constitutes an integrated perceptual whole.Listeners are often confused in melody recognition between transpositions of novel melodies and lures that copy the contour (the ups and downs) of the target but not its interval sizes. For example, immediately after hearing the melody in . This confusion is particularly strong when the transposition is to a closely related key in the musical sense; that is, when the musical scale underlying the transposition is very similar to the scale underlying the original melody (Bartlett & Dowling, 1980). The confusion of melodies that are different in intervallic detail but are similar in contour and scale suggests that contour and scale are important features in memory for melodies (Dowling, 1978). Figure 2 elaborates on the notion of scale and contour as important features of the pitch material of melodies.In the figure, parallel sets of features go from local characteristics of single melodies (in this case, the theme from Bach's "Little" G-minor Fugue, BWV 578) to global invariants that hold across sets of melodies, for example, the set of transpositions and contour-preserving imitations I thank Se-Yeul Kwak for assistance in generating the stimuli and Melinda Andrews and James C. Bartlett for helpful comments on the design and the manuscript. Requests for reprints should be addressed to W. Jay Dowling, Program in Applied Cognition and Neuroscience, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, of the fugue theme found in Bach's piece. (An "imitation" preserves pitch contour but not the exact interval sizes of a transpos...

The Perception of Tonal Structure Through the Differentiation and Organization of Pitches.

“…Although we have derived tonal magnitude as a power transformation of the standardized key profile, on reflection it is clear that tonal magnitude is in many ways comparable to the more familiar concept of tonal strength. Research on tonal strength has occupied a central place in work on musical cognition, with such investigations extensively studying, for example, the consequences of varying tonal strength on the processing of and memory for musical passages (e.g., Croonen, 1994Croonen, , 1995Cuddy, Cohen, & Mewhort, 1981;Cuddy, Cohen, & Miller, 1979;Cuddy & Lyons, 1981;Dowling, 1978Dowling, , 1991. In addition, this work has identified characteristics that make a passage tonally strong, with music heard as tonally strong if it (a) is diatonic, in that it is composed primarily of pitches of the diatonic set; (b) begins and ends on the tonic; and (c) exhibits cadential structure (e.g., contains a sequence of chords built on Pitch Class 0, followed by Pitch Class 7, and ending on Pitch Class 0).…”

Modality-Constrained Statistical Learning of Tactile, Visual, and Auditory Sequences.

“…The tone set used for the auditory stimuli was slightly different from before, consisting of 220 Hz, 246.9 Hz, 261.6 Hz, 277.2 Hz, and 329.6 Hz (i.e., the musical notes A, B, C, C#, and E, respectively). As with the previous tone set, we used these tones because they avoid familiar melodies (Dowling, 1991). Additionally, this new tone set spans a smaller frequency range (220 Hz to 329.6 Hz, as opposed to 261.6 Hz to 493.8 Hz).…”

Cues for Key Perception of a Melody

“…Other researchers also proposed that specific intervals function as additional perceptual cues (e.g., Huovinen, 2002;Vos, 1999). Moreover, characteristics other than specific intervals have been indicated as additional cues for key perception, for example: two and three tone transitions (Krumhansl, 1979(Krumhansl, , 1990(Krumhansl, , 2000; a grouping of consecutive pitches on the basis of pitch proximity (Deutsch, 1984); a combination of specific intervals (e.g., Vos, 2000); the last tone of a sequence (Lamont, 1998;Parncutt & Bregman, 2000); both the pitches of the opening tone and the last tone of a sequence (Cuddy, Cohen, & Mewhort, 1981;Dowling, 1991); a combination of specific pitches (e.g., Bharucha, 1984;Cuddy, et al, 1981;Povel & Jansen, 2001, 2002; and pitch salience and sensory memory decay (Huron & Parncutt, 1993).…”