Melody Discrimination Research Articles

Preservación de la memoria musical en un síndrome amnésico

In amnesic syndromes, it's usually to see dissociation between episodic, semantic and procedural memory. However, a few reports have been found about musical memory's processing and the relation with classic memory systems. To describe the musical's abilities preserved in a patient with amnesic syndrome and discuss possible neuropsychological and neurobiological bases implicated. A 28-years-old woman presenting with amnesic syndrome is reported. Following a carbon monoxide encephalophaty and subsequent hypoxia she remained in coma for 10 days with evidence of bilateral temporal changes, mainly affecting basal ganglia areas. The patient showed anterograde amnesia and semantic memory impairment, with disproportionately spared musical abilities' performance, either music perception (discrimination and recognition of tonal melodies, musical sight-reading) or music production (song and instrumental performance) or musical memory. This case suggests that the music require elaborate bihemispheric processing and may implicate different forms of information processing. The neural network involved in musical memory can be different that the declarative memory systems (episodic and semantic).

Receptive amusia: temporal auditory processing deficit in a professional musician following a left temporo-parietal lesion

This study examined the musical processing in a professional musician who suffered from amusia after a left temporo-parietal stroke. The patient showed preserved metric judgement and normal performance in all aspects of melodic processing. By contrast, he lost the ability to discriminate or reproduce rhythms. Arrhythmia was only observed in the auditory modality: discrimination of auditorily presented rhythms was severely impaired, whereas performance was normal in the visual modality. Moreover, a length effect was observed in discrimination of rhythm, while this was not the case for melody discrimination. The arrhythmia could not be explained by low-level auditory processing impairments such as interval and length discrimination and the impairment was limited to auditory input, since the patient produced correct rhythmic patterns from a musical score. Since rhythm processing was selectively disturbed in the auditory modality, the arrhythmia cannot be attributed to a impairment of supra-modal temporal processing. Rather, our findings suggest modality-specific encoding of musical temporal information. Besides, it is proposed that the processing of auditory rhythmic sequences involves a specific left hemispheric temporal buffer.

Culture-General and Culture-Specific Factors in the Discrimination of Melodies

We examined effects of a culture-general factor, pattern redundancy (number of repeated tones), on the discrimination of 5-tone melodies that differed in their adherence to Western tonal conventions. Experiment 1 evaluated the ability of 9-month-old infants to differentiate “standard” melodies from subtly altered “comparison” melodies. Greater redundancy of the standard melodies was associated with enhanced infant performance, but musical conventionality had no effect. Experiment 2 evaluated comparable abilities in 5-year-old children and musically untrained adults. Children's performance was enhanced by the redundancy of standard melodies, but the effect was greater in conventional than in unconventional contexts. The redundancy of standard melodies facilitated adults' performance in conventional but not in unconventional contexts. Thus, increasing musical exposure seems to attenuate the effects of culture-general factors such as pattern redundancy while amplifying the influence of culture-specific factors.

Dissociation Between Recognition and Emotional Judgements for Melodies

Abstract Current neuropsychological models of face pereception admit three separate routes for processing information required in the recognition of a familiar face, in the matching of unfamiliar faces and in the analysis of facial expressions. The present study investigated these classes of abilities for music processing in a music agnosic woman, IR, who sustained bllateral cerebral damage. The results show selective sparing of the processing of emothional tone of melodies in the presence of severe deficits in the discrimination and recognition of familiar and unfamiliar melodies. This dissociation supports the existence of two separate routes for the treatment of properties that subserve recognition and emotional evaluation of music.

Dissociation between recognition and emotional judgements for melodies

Current neuropsychological models of face pereception admit three separate routes for processing information required in the recognition of a familiar face, in the matching of unfamiliar faces and in the analysis of facial expressions. The present study investigated these classes of abilities for music processing in a music agnosic woman, IR, who sustained bllateral cerebral damage. The results show selective sparing of the processing of emothional tone of melodies in the presence of severe deficits in the discrimination and recognition of familiar and unfamiliar melodies. This dissociation supports the existence of two separate routes for the treatment of properties that subserve recognition and emotional evaluation of music.

Contribution of different cortical areas in the temporal lobes to music processing.

Music processing ability was studied in 65 right-handed patients who had undergone unilateral temporal cortectomy for the relief of intractable epilepsy, and 24 matched normal controls. The ability to recognize changes in note intervals and to distinguish between different rhythms and metres was tested by presentation of sequences of simple musical phrases with variations in either pitch or temporal dimensions. The responses (right or wrong) enabled us to determine in which component of the music processing mechanism the patients had deficits and hence, knowing the positions of the surgical lesions, to identify their separate cerebral locations. The results showed that a right temporal cortectomy impaired the use of both contour and interval information in the discrimination of melodies and a left temporal cortectomy impaired only the use of interval information. Moreover, they underlined the importance of the superior temporal gyrus in melody processing. The excision of a part of the auditory areas (posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus) was found to be most detrimental for pitch and temporal variation processing. In the temporal dimension, we observed a dissociation between metre and rhythm and the critical involvement of the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus in metric processing. This study highlights the relevance of dissociating musical abilities into their most significant cognitive components in order to identify their separate cerebral locations.

Developmental issues in melody discrimination

Developmental issues in melody discrimination

Identification and discrimination disorders in auditory perception: A report on two cases

Auditory perception was investigated in two brain-damaged subjects. The first patient had a left temporoparietal ischaemic lesion. He presented a right-ear extinction in dichotic tasks, as well as difficulties in understanding and repeating verbal material and impaired identification of melodies. All discrimination tests were well performed. The second patient had a right capsulolenticular and frontal ischaemic lesion. He presented a left ear dichotic extinction and severe difficulties in discrimination of environmental sounds and melodies but no major difficulty in naming and identification. From these results, it is hypothesized that identification and discrimination involve distinct mechanisms within the processing of auditory stimuli, and that they may be selectively disrupted in brain-damaged subjects.

Discrimination and recognition of tonal melodies after unilateral cerebral excisions

Groups of surgical patients with unilateral temporal- or frontal-lobe lesions and normal control subjects were tested in melodic discrimination and recognition tasks. The discrimination task required detection of a single-note change in a pair of short unfamiliar tonal melodies. The altered note either violated or preserved the contour, the scale, or both, of the original melody. Recognition required that the melodies used in the discrimination task be recognized from among a set of similar foils. Right temporal-lobe patients performed most poorly in discrimination. Further analysis showed that excision of the primary auditory receiving area. Heschl's gyri from either side resulted in a deficit which was independent from, but additive with, the deficit caused by right temporal lobectomy. In the recognition task, both temporal-lobe groups were impaired as compared to control. The use of scale and contour cues was similar for all groups, indicating that the deficits observed are not attributable to failure to process one of these cues. Right frontal-lobe lesioned patients differed from the others in response bias, but performed as well as controls on both tasks. The results are interpreted as evidence for two processes in melodic discrimination, one due to short-term memory mechanisms, the other attributable to a deficit in processing complex auditory patterns.

“Figural” and “tonal” aspects of melody discrimination

Tone sequences were synthesized using a random process constrained to generate relatively close approximations to the tonal relationships found in melodies which occur in music. In control sequences these constraints are systematically inverted. Other melody variables were fixed (e.g., rhythm) or completely randomized. The perceptual task involved discrimination between “same transposed” and “different transposed” melody pairs. Alterations which changed the “contour” of the melody were compared with those which preserved contour. We find that contour violation and a low “5th span” of the melody intervals aid discrimination, and these operate independently. We also examined diatonic scale, contour and tuning, the latter being equal temperament (100 cents per semi‐tone), “micro” (60 cents per semitone) or “macro” (140 cents per semi‐tone). A discrimination advantage for melodies based on a diatonic scale is only found for equal temperament tuning, whereas contour violation aids discrimination regardless of tuning. We conclude that contour is a general perceptual property of serial auditory patterns (“figural”), whereas scale and 5th span are specific to sequences heard as music (“tonal”).

Discrimination of melodies from the first and fifth serials of the pentatonic scale

A basic aspect of music is the scale or set of tones that is used to generate melodic and rhythmic patterns. There is one scale that has a prominent place in the music of many cultures. This scale, the pentatonic, dates back as far as 1300 B.C. and extends to the present. Data are presented on the discrimination of melodies randomly generated from the first and fifth serials of the pentatonic scale. The question is: does the part of the scale used to generate a melody give a distinct quality to the melody? The results show that such melodies can be discriminated independently of melodic line, rhythm, frequency range, and tone color. This suggests that melodies can be heard as being from two different serials, indicating that each of these serials possesses a quality, a tonality, that yields perceptually different melodies. The results are related to Orff’s theory of musical development.

An investigation into the development of melodic interval discrimination

Trotter's “melometer” was used to investigate some proposals concerning melody discrimination. An analysis of covariance which controlled for scores on the “Wing Test of Musical Intelligence” showed that discrimination differed in artists, professional musicians and students. The significant difference between the groups indicated three levels of discrimination, one of which was attributed to musical training and the other to some underlying ability common to the Fine Arts. This finding was contrasted with some of Trotter's proposals, the method was evaluated and some possible limitations of the experiment given.