Pairs Of Melodies Research Articles

The effects of aging and musicianship on the use of auditory streaming cues.

Auditory stream segregation, or separating sounds into their respective sources and tracking them over time, is a fundamental auditory ability. Previous research has separately explored the impacts of aging and musicianship on the ability to separate and follow auditory streams. The current study evaluated the simultaneous effects of age and musicianship on auditory streaming induced by three physical features: intensity, spectral envelope and temporal envelope. In the first study, older and younger musicians and non-musicians with normal hearing identified deviants in a four-note melody interleaved with distractors that were more or less similar to the melody in terms of intensity, spectral envelope and temporal envelope. In the second study, older and younger musicians and non-musicians participated in a dissimilarity rating paradigm with pairs of melodies that differed along the same three features. Results suggested that auditory streaming skills are maintained in older adults but that older adults rely on intensity more than younger adults while musicianship is associated with increased sensitivity to spectral and temporal envelope, acoustic features that are typically less effective for stream segregation, particularly in older adults.

Change detection and schematic processing in music

Research into vision has highlighted the importance of gist representations in change detection and memory. This article puts forth the hypothesis that schematic processing and gist provide an account for change detection in music as well, where a musical gist is an abstracted memory representation for schematically consistent tones. The present experiments illuminate the content of gist memory representations by testing when listeners can detect single-tone changes in pairs of melodies. In Experiment 1, musicians and non-musicians listened to melodies varying in tonal structure. Less structure resulted in compromised change detection in both groups. Most often, musicians displayed more accurate change detection than non-musicians, but, surprisingly, when schematic processing could not contribute to memory encoding, musicians performed worse than their untrained counterparts. Experiment 2 utilized a full-factorial design to examine tonality, interval of pitch change, metrical position, and rhythm. Tonality had a particularly large effect on performance, with non-scale tones generally aiding change detection. Listeners were unlikely, however, to detect schematically-inconsistent tones when only brief melodic context was available. The results uphold the hypothesis that memory for melodies relies on schematic processing, with change detection dependent upon whether the change alters the schematic gist of the melody.

Compression-based Modelling of Musical Similarity Perception

Similarity is an important concept in music cognition research since the similarity between (parts of) musical pieces determines perception of stylistic categories and structural relationships between parts of musical works. The purpose of the present research is to develop and test models of musical similarity perception inspired by a transformational approach which conceives of similarity between two perceptual objects in terms of the complexity of the cognitive operations required to transform the representation of the first object into that of the second, a process which has been formulated in information-theoretic terms. Specifically, computational simulations are developed based on compression distance in which a probabilistic model is trained on one piece of music and then used to predict, or compress, the notes in a second piece. The more predictable the second piece according to the model, the more efficiently it can be encoded and the greater the similarity between the two pieces. The present research extends an existing information-theoretic model of auditory expectation (IDyOM) to compute compression distances varying in symmetry and normalisation using high-level symbolic features representing aspects of pitch and rhythmic structure. Comparing these compression distances with listeners’ similarity ratings between pairs of melodies collected in three experiments demonstrates that the compression-based model provides a good fit to the data and allows the identification of representations, model parameters and compression-based metrics that best account for musical similarity perception. The compression-based model also shows comparable performance to the best-performing algorithms on the MIREX 2005 melodic similarity task.

Familiarity of Western melodies: An exploratory approach to influences of national culture, genre and musical expertise

It is unknown to what extent listeners in different Western countries share long-term representations of melodies as well as their genre associations, and whether such knowledge is modulated through music training. A group of German listeners ( N = 40) rated their familiarity with 144 melody excerpts from different genres implicitly (melody structure) and explicitly (melody title). Melodies were identical to those used in a previous Franco-Canadian study (Peretz, Babaï, Lussier, Hébert, & Gagnon, 1995). In addition, melodies were attributed by the participants to predefined genre categories, and similarities between pairs of melodies were computed, using an algorithm by Müllensiefen and Frieler (2006). Results revealed patterns of (un)familiarity, which, in part, deviated from the previous study. Melodies from classical, ceremonial, and – to a lesser extent – children’s songs categories were rated as most familiar, whereas traditional and more recent francophone tunes from mixed categories were judged as unfamiliar. Music training had no significant influence on implicit memory for melodies but rather on explicit knowledge of their titles. Computational analyses suggest that highly familiar and highly unfamiliar tunes share structural features with melodies belonging to the same category, whereas dissimilarities were detected between certain clusters of genre categories. Taken together, these results suggest that long-term representation of melodies is influenced by a listener’s (Western) national background. Representations are differently affected by specific genres but only partially influenced by music training and by structural properties.

Contributions of pitch contour, tonality, rhythm, and meter to melodic similarity.

The identity of a melody resides in its sequence of pitches and durations, both of which exhibit surface details as well as structural properties. In this study, pitch contour (pattern of ups and downs) served as pitch surface information, and tonality (musical key) as pitch structure; in the temporal dimension, surface information was the ordinal duration ratios of adjacent notes (rhythm), and meter (beat, or pulse) comprised the structure. Factorially manipulating the preservation or alteration of all of these forms of information in 17 novel melodies (typifying Western music) enabled measuring their effect on perceived melodic similarity. In Experiment 1, 34 participants (varied musical training) rated the perceived similarity of melody pairs transposed to new starting pitches. Rhythm was the largest contributor to perceived similarity, then contour, meter, and tonality. Experiment 2 used the same melodies but varied the tempo within a pair, and added a prefix of 3 chords, which oriented the listener to the starting pitch and tempo before the melody began. Now contour was the strongest influence on similarity ratings, followed by tonality, and then rhythm; meter was not significant. Overall, surface features influenced perceived similarity more than structural, but both had observable effects. The primary theoretical advances in melodic similarity research are that (a) the relative emphasis on pitch and temporal factors is flexible; (b) pitch and time functioned independently when factorially manipulated, regardless of which dimension is more influential; and (c) interactions between surface and structural information were unreliable and never occurred between dimensions.

Melody and chord discrimination of cochlear implant users in different pitch ranges

ObjectiveThe study assesses the ability of cochlear implant (CI) recipients to discriminate music excerpts, namely melodies and chords. Natural instrument recordings were used to test whether an improved fine-structure transmission is beneficial for this task at low pitches.MethodsSeventeen CI recipients using either a continuously interleaved strategy (CIS) strategy or fine-structure coding (FSP) had to discriminate melody pairs played by the violin or the cello, and pairs of chords differing at high or low pitches. The examples were taken from the Mu.S.I.C. perception test.ResultsIn the melody task, no differences were found according to pitch range or processing strategy. In the chords task, changes in the low-pitch range provided a significantly greater difficulty for CI recipients using the CIS stategy and correct detection was reduced by 11.1% compared to the detection of high-pitch changes. This drop in performance was reduced in the FSP users to 7.4% correct and was statistically not significant.ConclusionsWhen musical chords played with natural instrument are discriminated by CI users, a fine-structure coding strategy provides some benefit at low pitches. No benefit was found in the discrimination of unaccompanied melodies.

Emotional Connotations of Diatonic Modes

In this experiment, participants (nonmusicians) heard pairs of melodies and had to judge which of the two melodies was happier. Each pair consisted of a single melody presented in two different diatonic modes (Lydian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Dorian, Aeolian, or Phrygian) with a constant tonic of C; all pairs of modes were used. The results suggest that modes imply increasing happiness as scale-degrees are raised, with the exception of Lydian, which is less happy than Ionian. Overall, the results are best explained by familiarity: Ionian (major mode), the most common mode in both classical and popular music, is the happiest, and happiness declines with increasing distance from Ionian. However, familiarity does not entirely explain our results. Familiarity predicts that Mixolydian would be happier than Lydian (since they are equally similar to Ionian, and Mixolydian is much more common in popular music); but for almost half of our participants, the reverse was true. This suggests that the “sharpness” of a mode also affects its perceived happiness, either due to pitch height or to the position of the scale relative to the tonic on the “line of fifths”; we favor the latter explanation.

Composing by Listening

Most people communicate emotion through their voice, facial expressions, and gestures. However, it is assumed that only “experts” can communicate emotions in music. The authors have developed a computer-based system that enables musically untrained users to select relevant acoustic attributes to compose emotional melodies. Nonmusicians (Experiment 1) and musicians (Experiment 3) were progressively presented with pairs of melodies that each differed in an acoustic attribute (e.g., intensity - loud vs. soft). For each pair, participants chose the melody that most strongly conveyed a target emotion (anger, fear, happiness, sadness or tenderness). Once all decisions were made, a final melody containing all choices was generated. The system allowed both untrained and trained participants to compose a range of emotional melodies. New listeners successfully decoded the emotional melodies of nonmusicians (Experiment 2) and musicians (Experiment 4). Results indicate that human-computer interaction can facilitate the composition of emotional music by musically untrained and trained individuals.

Musician Advantages in Music Perception: An Issue of Motivation, Not Just Ability

two experiments examined effects of regulatory fit and music training on performance on one subtest of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA). Participants made same-different judgments about melody pairs, while either gaining points for correct answers (gains condition) or losing points for incorrect answers (losses condition). In Experiment 1, participants were told that the test was diagnostic of their music ability and then were asked to self-identify as a musician or a nonmusician. In Experiment 2, participants were given either a promotion-focus prime (a performance-based opportunity to gain entry into a raffle) or a prevention-focus prime (a raffle ticket was awarded at the start of the experiment and participants prevented its loss by maintaining a certain level of performance). Consistent with a regulatory fit hypothesis, nonmusicians and promotion-primed participants performed better in the gains condition than the losses condition, while musicians and prevention-primed participants performed better in the losses condition than the gains condition. Experiment 2 additionally revealed that regulatory fit effects were stronger for musicians than nonmusicians. This study demonstrates that regulatory fit impacts performance on the MBEA and highlights the importance of motivational orientation with respect to musician performance advantages in music perception.

Is independent creation likely to happen in pop music?

In this study we try to address the question of whether independent (re-)creations are likely to happen in pop music. The interest in this topic stems from the fact that the claim of an “independent creation” is a common defence strategy in copyright infringement lawsuits. We conducted a main experiment in which subjects were asked to invent short, “catchy” pop melodies to a given backing track over a very common chord sequence (I VI IV V). Additionally, we incorporated 5 melodies from hit songs over the same chords in a comparable tempo. The collected melodies were examined for similarities, between participants’ melodies and hit songs on the one hand, and between participants’ songs on the other. In each case at least two melody pairs with high similarity were found. A deeper analysis of these cases revealed that indeed independent (re-)creations might have taken place.

Melodic Contour Similarity Using Folk Melodies

Melodic contour, or the pattern of rises and falls in pitch, is a critical component of melodic structure, and has an important impact on listeners' perceptions of, and memory for, music. Despite its centrality, few formal models of contour structure exist. One recent exception involves characterizing contour by the relative degrees of strength of its cyclic information, quantified via a Fourier analysis of the pitch code of the contour. Three experiments explored the applicability of this approach, demonstrating that listeners' similarity ratings for pairs of melodies were predictable from Fourier analysis quantifications of rhythmically complex (Experiment 1) and rhythmically simple (Experiment 2) melodies, as well as for derived similarity measures based on melodic complexity judgments (Experiment 3). These findings indicate that Fourier analysis is an effective model of melodic contour, and that it can predict perceived melodic similarity.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE RIGHT AND LEFT MESIAL TEMPORAL LOBES TO MUSIC MEMORY: EVIDENCE FROM MELODIC LEARNING DIFFICULTIES

THE AIM OF THIS STUDY WAS TO ASSESS the effects of left- and right-sided MTL damage on melodic memory using a newly developed arbitrary relational learning task. Participants included patients with MTL damage, patient controls,musicians, and musician controls. The learning curves of these groups showed striking differences, with right MTL patients failing to learn tonal (easy) melody pairs. Both patient groups had difficulty learning nontonal (hard) pairs. Performance was greatest for the musicians, particularly for the nontonal melody pairs. These differences were not primarily attributable to pitch discrimination or pitch working memory impairments. The findings point to differential contributions of the left and right mesial temporal lobes to melodic memory, with specificity of the right mesial temporal lobe emerging for melodic learning within a tonal musical context.

A “voice inversion effect?”

Voice is the carrier of speech but is also an “auditory face” rich in information on the speaker’s identity and affective state. Three experiments explored the possibility of a “voice inversion effect,” by analogy to the classical “face inversion effect,” which could support the hypothesis of a voice-specific module. Experiment 1 consisted of a gender identification task on two syllables pronounced by 90 speakers (boys, girls, men, and women). Experiment 2 consisted of a speaker discrimination task on pairs of syllables (8 men and 8 women). Experiment 3 consisted of an instrument discrimination task on pairs of melodies (8 string and 8 wind instruments). In all three experiments, stimuli were presented in 4 conditions: (1) no inversion; (2) temporal inversion (e.g., backwards speech); (3) frequency inversion centered around 4000 Hz; and (4) around 2500 Hz. Results indicated a significant decrease in performance caused by sound inversion, with a much stronger effect for frequency than for temporal inversion. Interestingly, although frequency inversion markedly affected timbre for both voices and instruments, subjects’ performance was still above chance. However, performance at instrument discrimination was much higher than for voices, preventing comparison of inversion effects for voices vs. non-vocal stimuli. Additional experiments will be necessary to conclude on the existence of a possible “voice inversion effect.”

Local and Global Processing of Music in High‐functioning Persons with Autism: Beyond Central Coherence?

A multi-modal abnormality in the integration of parts and whole has been proposed to account for a bias toward local stimuli in individuals with autism (Frith, 1989; Mottron & Belleville, 1993). In the current experiment, we examined the utility of hierarchical models in characterising musical information processing in autistic individuals. Participants were 13 high-functioning individuals with autism and 13 individuals of normal intelligence matched on chronological age, nonverbal IQ, and laterality, and without musical experience. The task consisted of same-different judgements of pairs of melodies. Differential local and global processing was assessed by manipulating the level, local or global, at which modifications occurred. No deficit was found in the two measures of global processing. In contrast, the clinical group performed better than the comparison group in the detection of change in nontransposed, contour-preserved melodies that tap local processing. These findings confirm the existence of a "local bias" in music perception in individuals with autism, but challenge the notion that it is accounted for by a deficit in global music processing. The present study suggests that enhanced processing of elementary physical properties of incoming stimuli, as found previously in the visual modality, may also exist in the auditory modality.

A psychological experiment on quantitative judgment for transposition of melodies

Novice musicians have difficulty in judging the interval between a melody and its transpose quantitatively. It is expected that the more one accumulates musical experiences, the more he or she can improve their ability of quantitative judgment for the interval between a melody and its transpose. It is supposed that this ability depends on abilities of absolute pitch. Psychological experiments were conducted to investigate relations among these abilities. Single tones, pairs of single tones, and pairs of melodies and their transposes generated by a synthesizer were used for the experiments. Subjects (students majoring in music) were asked to give pitch names of single tones presented in isolation, to judge intervals between two single tones presented sequentially, and to estimate the interval between a melody and its transpose presented on a continuous rhythm pattern. From the experiments, it can be seen that there are various types of difficulties in judging musical intervals between two single tones and those between melodies and their transposes. Further, weak correlation has been found between the ability to judge intervals between two single tones, and the ability to judge intervals between a melody and its transpose.

Thai music in Java, Javanese music in Thailand: Two case studies

Thailand and Java share a large number of basic musical traits, yet a contrastive study of settings of the same melody in each country's style can highlight what is distinctive about those styles. Such “contrastive analysis” is applied to two pairs of melodies: the Javanese gamelan piece Ladrang Siyem, derived in 1929 from a Western‐influenced Thai tune Sanrasoen Phra Barami; and the Thai piece Yawa Kao, an adaptation of the gamelan piece Ladrang Bima Kurda. Variation will be noted in parameters such as tuning, macro structure, phrase structure, polyphonic treatment, melodic disjunction, and overall degree of absorption. Whereas the borrowed Thai piece was almost totally converted into typical gamelan performance style, the Thais continue to treat the Javanese piece as a foreign borrowing.

Shifting Ear Differences in Melody Comparison Through Transposition

Nonmusicians were required to classify pairs of melodies as “same” or “different”. When they were instructed to compare melodies played at the same pitch level as fast as possible, a REA was elicited. In contrast, a tendency in favor of the left ear came out when, all other things being equal, melodies were transposed, i.e. played at a different pitch level. Transposition was thus instrumental in leading subjects to rely more on right-hemisphere processing. Independent evidence for a change in the processing mode that whas adopted with these two types of material was provided by the response times. The results indicated the use of a selfterminating process of analytic search only with the untransposed melodies. Results are discussed in terms of the notion that the preferential use of local or global properties in melodies determines the intervention of the left or the right cerebral hemisphere, respectively.

Analytic processing in the classification of melodies as same or different

Two groups of non-musicians were required to classify pairs of melodies as “same” or “different”. The experimental group was instructed to respond as fast as possible, while the control group did not receive such a speed requirement. Contrary to the control subjects, the experimental subjects exhibited a right-ear advantage in accuracy for “different” responses. Thus, time pressure was instrumental in inducing subjects to rely mainly on left-hemisphere processing. The fact that “different” responses were both faster than “same” ones and quicker than melody offset indicates the use of a self-terminating search process. The features searched for were, in all likelihood, local. Indeed, contrary to control subjects, experimental subjects performed equally well with (1) melodies differing in both contour and local pitches and with (2) melodies differing in local pitches only.

Recognition of Novel Melodies after Brief Delays

Three experiments on the recognition of short melodies investigated the influence of contour and interval information (respectively, the pattern of changes in pitch direction and the ordered sequence of pitch distances in a melody). Subjects rated pairs of melodies as "same" or "different" on a five-point scale. Six conditions were defined by two delays (short, 1 sec; and long, 30 sec) and three item types (target, related, and lure). In Target pairs, the second melody retained the contour and interval information of the first melody, being an exact transposition to another key. In Related pairs, only the contour information was retained, while in the Lure pairs neither contour nor interval information was retained. In conformity with the reports of Dowling and Bartlett (1981), the results indicated that contour information had a larger influence on recognition at short delays, whereas interval information had a relatively larger influence at long delays. The results are also consistent with an alternative interpretation stressing the importance of tonality/modality information in melody recognition at long delays.

Scale, key, and contour in the discrimination of tuned and mistuned approximations to melody.

Approximations to melody were synthesized using a computational technique whereby the occurrences of certain notes and intervals were made more probable than others. In experimental melodies, these notes and intervals were chosen to clarify the diatonic scale and the key of the melody. To clarify the scale of a melody, the probabilities of the diatonic scale notes were made higher than those of nonscale notes. Perception of these melodies was compared with control melodies in which the higher probabilities were assigned to a different set of notes. The latter were chosen so that no single diatonic scale embraced the set. To clarify the key of a melody, intervals with a low “fifth-span” were made more probable than intervals with a high fifth-span, while control melodies had the higher probabilities assigned to intervals with a high fifth-span. Here fifth-span is the separation of two notes measured along a progression of fifths. Listeners heard pairs of melodies and were asked to discriminate between pairs of different melodies and pairs in which the second melody was an exact transposition of the first. It was found that this discrimination was easier if the first melody contained a high proportion of diatonic-scale notes. A similar perceptual advantage held for melodies composed of intervals with low fifth-spans. Discrimination was also easier if the contour of the second melody in a different-pair differed from that of the first. The melodies were then mistuned by changing the size of the quantal interval (semitone) by a constant (log) factor. In this way, two types of mistuned melodies were generated: melodies for which the quantal interval was reduced, and melodies for which the quantal interval was increased. Discrimination advantages for diatonic scale and low fifth-span were not found for these mistuned melodies. Nevertheless, differences in contour still led to improved discrimination. It is concluded that melody perception draws on music-specific perceptual knowledge as well as more general factors. Mistuning destroys the perceptual advantages found for the melodies with a clear scale and a clear key. These attributes are therefore considered to be specific to music. By contrast, the perceptual salience of pitch contours is more general in origin, because it was shown for both the tuned and the mistuned tone sequences.