Tone chroma is functional in melody recognition.

Abstract

Musical notes can be defined both in terms of their fundamental frequencies (tone height) and their positions in the musical octave (tone chroma). Although there is some evidence indicating that hoth tone height and chroma can contribute to tone perception, Deutsch 11969, 1972) suggested that chroma is not functional in melody recognition. By systematically transforming melodies so as to preserve one or another type of information, Idson and Massaro (1978) de~nonstrated that chroma was also functional in melody recognition. However, in the Idson and Massaro study, subjects repeatedly heard the same melodies and were asked to identify them out of a limited set of possibilities (forced-choice procedure). The repetition of melodies and the forced-choice procedure might have encouraged subjects to develop special recognition strategies. To preclude this possibility, subjects in the present experiments heard each melody only once and were not informed in advance of the possible melodies. When systematic transformations similar to those used by Idson and Massaro were applied to familiar melodies, similar results were found. Therefore, it is unlikely that special recognition strategies were responsible for the results of the Idson and Massaro (1978) study: tone chroma contributes to melody recognition in both types of experimental procedures. The functional role of tone chroma in melody recognition is consistent with the idea that octave generalization not only applies to l:he perception of single tones but also occurs in the perception of successive intervals.