Abstract
While mastering a musical instrument takes years, becoming familiar with a new music system requires less time and skills. In this study, we examine whether musically untrained Western listeners can incidentally learn an unfamiliar, microtonal musical scale from simply engaging in a timbre discrimination task. The experiment is comprised of an Exposure and a Test phase. During Exposure, 21 non-musicians were instructed to detect a timbre shift (TS) within short microtonal melodies, and we hypothesised that they would incidentally learn about the pitch interval structure of the microtonal scale from attending to the melodies during the task. In a follow-up Test phase, the tone before the TS was either a member (congruent) or a non-member (incongruent) of the scale. Based on our statistical manipulation of the stimuli, incongruent tones would be a better predictor of an incoming TS than the congruent tones. We therefore expect a faster response time to the shift after the participants have heard an incongruent tone. Specifically, a faster response time observed after an incongruent tone would imply participants’ ability to differentiate tones from the microtonal and the diatonic scale, and reflect their learning of the microtonal pitch intervals. Results are consistent with our predictions. In investigating the learning of a microtonal scale, our study can offer directions for future research on the perception of computer music and new musical genres.
Highlights
Music has become more accessible since the late 20th century when different music genres and world music from all over the globe can be freely obtained through the media
We used mixed effects models to examine the possible factors of timbre shift detection ability, including pitch sensitivity and stimulus-related properties such as pitch distance between the original and the incongruent pitch intervals in each trial of the Incongruent condition
These models allow us to examine the trajectory of performance change over the time course of the task, which indicates whether the statistical learning of the stimuli is successful
Summary
Music has become more accessible since the late 20th century when different music genres and world music from all over the globe can be freely obtained through the media. Creating music can be achieved by using computer software, which opens room for non-traditional music. Past research has provided insights on how humans perceive different attributes of Western music, including tonality, rhythm and timbre [1,2,3], and how enculturation shapes our music perception [4,5].
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