THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THEcross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts from both familiar and unfamiliar cultures and then completed a recognition memory task for each set of examples. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their native culture and there were no performance differences based on musical expertise. In addition, Turkish participants were better at remembering Western music, a familiar but nonnative musical culture, than Chinese music. The results suggest that our cognitive schemata for musical information are culturally derived and that enculturation influences musical memory at a structural level.

Research on adults who identify as “tone deaf” suggest that their poor musical self-concept is shaped by a view of themselves as nonsingers even when their perceptual skills and singing ability are not significantly worse than the general population. Many of these adults self-selected out of further participation as children but expressed regret as adults for lost opportunities. The purpose of this investigation was to explore the role of musical self-concept, attitude, and related variables in predicting students’ decisions to participate in elective music instruction in junior high and whether those same variables were related to their assessed singing ability. Findings suggest that family music participation and positive attitudes toward music, particularly their view of themselves as musicians, can predict with 74% accuracy which students choose to continue in elective music. Musical self-concept was also a unique predictor of singing accuracy performance, suggesting a connection between students’ actual singing ability and their view of themselves as musicians.

The popular view of music as a "universal" language ignores the privileged position of the cultural insider in comprehending musical information unique to their own tradition. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that listeners would demonstrate different neural activity in response to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music and that those differences may be affected by the extent of subjects' formal musical training. Just as familiar languages have been shown to use distinct brain processes, we hypothesized that an analogous difference might be found in music and that it may depend in part on subjects' formal musical knowledge. Using fMRI we compared the activation patterns of professional musicians and untrained controls reared in the United States as they listened to music from their culture (Western) and from an unfamiliar culture (Chinese). No overall differences in activation were observed for either subject group in response to the two musical styles, although there were differences in recall performance based on style and there were activation differences based on training. Trained listeners demonstrated additional activation in the right STG for both musics and in the right and left midfrontal regions for Western music and Chinese music, respectively. Our findings indicate that listening to culturally different musics may activate similar neural resources but with dissimilar results in recall performance.

The skill of pitch-matching is a prerequisite for even the most casual musical participation. While singing accuracy has been carefully researched at the elementary level, there has been comparatively less research done with adolescents. The purpose of the study described here was to examine the influence of perceptual ability, task demands, and singing range on the pitch-matching performance of adolescent boys in various stages of the voice change. We found significant differences between certain, inconsistent, and uncertain singers in their perceptual skills and found that a contextual pitch-matching condition was significantly easier than a single-pitch condition. There was no difference by singing range. Future research should explore the progression of these skills longitudinally and continue to examine performance related to different task demands.

The purpose of this study was to test the effect of daily singing instruction on the singing accuracy of young children and whether accuracy differed across four singing tasks. In a pretest-posttest design over seven months we compared the singing accuracy of kindergarteners in a school receiving daily singing instruction from a music specialist to a control school receiving no curricular music instruction. All children completed four singing tasks at the beginning and end of the study: matching single pitches, matching intervals, matching short patterns, and singing a familiar song from memory. We found that both groups showed improvement on the pitch-matching tasks from pretest to posttest, but the experimental group demonstrated significantly more improvement. Performance on the familiar song task did not improve for either group. Students achieved the highest accuracy scores when matching intervals. Regular singing instruction seems to accelerate the development of accurate singing for young children, but the improvement was evident only in the pitch-matching tasks. It is possible that singing skill development proceeds from pitch-matching to the more difficult task of singing a song from memory. If so, this has implications for how we structure singing instruction in the early grades.