Cues for Key Perception of a Melody

Abstract

STUDIES HAVE SHOWN THAT PITCH SET, which refers to a set of pitches of constituent tones of a melody, is a primary cue for perceiving the key of a melody. The present study investigates whether characteristics other than pitch set function as additional cues for key perception. In Experiment 1, we asked 13 musicians with absolute p itch t o select k eys for 60 stim ulus t one sequences consisting of the same pitch set differing in pitch sequence. In Experiment 2, we asked 31 nonmusicians to select tonal centers for the 60 stimulus tone sequences. Responses made by the musicians and the nonmusicians yielded essentially equivalent results, suggesting that key perception is never unique to musicians. The listeners' responses were limited to a few keys/tones, and some tone sequences elicited agreement among the majority of the listeners for each of the keys/tones. These findings confirm that key perception is not only defined by pitch set but also influenced by characteristics other than pitch set such as pitch sequence.

Dynamic Cues in Key Perception

“…However, the original idea of the pitch full-set does not entirely account for the finding that different key perceptions emerge for melodies that consist of the same six-pitch full-set but differ in the temporal arrangements of these pitches (e.g., Matsunaga & Abe, 2005). The present study addressed the temporal order issue by introducing the concept of changing pitch subsets (i.e., changing pitch set at each point) as an important property of melodic structure.…”

“…Although AP musicians are often thought to be the special selected group, empirical studies have shown that tonal organization of AP musicians essentially shares the same characteristics with that of nonmusicians (e.g., Matsunaga & Abe, 2005;Temperly & Marvin, 2008). It is general that compared to responses of the nonmusician group, responses of the musician group can be less contaminated by extraneous factors.…”

“…The main reason for this restriction of key categories was to ensure a satisfactory sample size for discriminant analysis. Although most listeners perceive a given tone sequence to be in one of the set of keys that contain all pitches of the sequences as scale tones, non-musicians typically are more variable than musicians because they tend to be more influenced by extraneous factors (Matsunaga & Abe, 2005). For instance, if non-musicians had to select a final-tone from the 12 tone categories within one octave, their responses might concentrate about the keys of C#, G#, F, and A#, but the degree of concentration would be relatively low and might not be sufficient to allow reliable analysis.…”

Probing Questions About Keys: Tonal Distributions Through the DFT

“…Studies on human subjects have been much more attentive to the influence of temporal ordering on perceptions of key than the key-finding literature. Since distributions collapse the temporal dimension, they implicitly assume that the temporal order of pitch-classes does not influence the sense of key, even though experimental studies such as [5], [6], and [17] have amply demonstrated the importance of temporal order to key inferences. Approaches to key finding that deal with modulation by using windowed analysis, such as Temperley's ( [23], [24]) and Sapp's ( [21]), may partially address this concern.…”

Patrones tonales, generalización por clases y representación de la tonalidad. Un modelo de cognición tonal dependiente del contexto y el aprendizaje

“…Incluso más, observaron también que secuencias de eventos con la misma duración y frecuencia acumulada pueden o no promover un claro sentido tonal según cómo dichos eventos se ordenen en el tiempo. Y este mismo resultado fue reportado más recientemente por Matsunaga y Abe (2005), quienes examinaron un número más variado de secuencias y órdenes temporales. Estas evidencias sugieren, entonces, que el sentido de tonalidad surge de la información interválica provista por un pasaje u obra musical y, consecuentemente, que el contenido de la representación tonal es de naturaleza secuencial, y no acumulativa.…”