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.
Highlights
Melodies are abstractions, based on relations between consecutive notes in terms of pitch and time
The term relative pitch (RP) refers to the fact that memory for the pitches of melodies is based on relations between consecutive tones, rather than actual pitch values
RP allows individuals with no music training, who have no explicit knowledge of musical intervals, to recognize a familiar melody presented in a novel key, and to perceive when one note of a familiar song is sung sharp or flat in relation to tones that precede or follow it
Summary
Melodies are abstractions, based on relations between consecutive notes in terms of pitch and time. Higher recognition ratings for old than for new melodies confirmed that listeners remembered the pitch relations that defined the tunes. Higher ratings for old melodies presented in the original key—compared to those that were transposed—confirmed that listeners implicitly remembered the key. The results revealed two important findings: (1) adult listeners’ memory for melodies is relatively immune to changes in the delay between exposure and test, and (2) their mental representations include information about key for more than one but fewer than seven days. One consequence is the putative rarity of AP, and the related notion that very few listeners form mental representations of music that contain absolute information about pitch In line with this perspective, 5-year-olds outperform adults in a task that requires them to identify a “special note” from a set of seven notes [9]. The available literature allowed for three possibilities: compared to adults, the transposition could have a stronger detrimental effect, a weaker effect, or a similar effect
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