Organization in memory for familiar songs.

Abstract

The organizing principles in memory for familiar songs were investigated in two experiments. The hypothesis was that we do not store and remember each song in isolation. Rather, there exists a rich system of relationships among tunes that can be revealed through similarity rating studies and memory tasks. One initial assumption was the. division of relations among tunes into musical (tempo, rhythm, etc,) and nonmusical similarity. In the first experiment, subjects were asked: to sort 60 familiar tunes into groups according to both musical and nonmusical criteria. Clustering analyses showed clear patterns of nonmusical similarity but few instances of musical similarity. The second experiment explored the psychological validity of the nonmusical relationships revealed in Experiment 1. A speeded verification task showed that songs similar to each other are confused more often than are distantly related songs. A free-recall task showed greater clustering for closely related songs than for distantly related ones. The relationship between these studies and studies of semantic memory is discussed. Also, the contribution of musical training and individual knowledge to the organization of the memory system is considered. Humans from infancy to old age are able producers of music. Even before reaching an age of 2 years old, children can produce spontaneous songs using distinct pitches and occasional rhythmic patterns (McKernon, 1979). Most adults whistle or sing an enormous repertory of songs and fragments of larger pieces. In addition, people of all ages are competent and enthusiastic music listeners. Simply the ubiquity of music perception would make it a topic of interest to cognitive psychologists. In addition, the fact that music lacks facile verbal referents presents a challenge to theorists accustomed to dealing with perception and memory for verbal, pictorial, and prepositional material. Are there regularities in music processing comparable to those found in these other subfields of cognitive psychology?