Effect of Music Training and Musical Complexity on Focus of Attention to Melody or Harmony

Williams, Lindsey

doi:10.2307/3598680

Cited by 6 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…Consistent with previous research, the results of this study showed that listeners with more training perceived music differently from those with less training (Byo, 1997;Flowers, 1985Flowers, , 2000Johnson, 1996;Johnson & Kelly, 1995;Sheldon & Gregory, 1997;Williams, 2005). University and high school students differed in focus of attention to music elements from each other for 9 out of 12 excerpts.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

“…Other research investigating amount of training and patterns of listening has found that listeners with more musical training seem to perceive music differently than listeners with less training (Byo, 1997;Flowers, 1985Flowers, , 2000Johnson, 1996;Johnson & Kelly, 1995;Sheldon & Gregory, 1997;Williams, 2005). Listeners with more musical training have been found to perceive tempo decreases with greater accuracy than increases (Sheldon & Gregory, 1997).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Listeners with more musical training have been found to perceive tempo decreases with greater accuracy than increases (Sheldon & Gregory, 1997). As music training increases, so does harmonic focus of attention (Williams, 2005). Graduate music majors have been found to use more technical music terms to describe music than undergraduate music majors (Flowers, 1985) and spend more time listening to strings and significantly less time listening to all instrument families than do undergraduate or junior high students (Johnson & Kelly, 1995).…”

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confidence: 99%

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A descriptive study of high school and university students' focus of attention in fast and slow orchestral excerpts

MacLeod¹,

Geringer

Scott

2009

International Journal of Music Education

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Abstract:The purpose of this study was to investigate listener discrimination of orchestral performances and to ascertain focus of listener attention to technical and expressive music elements of those performances. High School (n = 84) and University (n = 84) music students listened to four orchestral excerpts: two slow/soft excerpts and two fast/loud excerpts. Recordings representing three levels of performance were presented: high school, university and professional. Listeners rated excerpts on accuracy and musicality, and identified the most noticeable element of each performance. Results indicated that listeners discriminated between performance levels. In the slow excerpts, university students noticed intonation and tone most frequently, while high school students noticed dynamics and tone. For the fast examples, university students noted dynamics, accuracy and articulation. High school students noticed dynamics overwhelmingly. Listeners noticed a wide variety of elements for the slow examples, whereas responses were more similar for the fast excerpts.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 80%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A descriptive study of high school and university students' focus of attention in fast and slow orchestral excerpts

MacLeod¹,

Geringer

Scott

2009

International Journal of Music Education

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“…Although it is possible to ignore extra-harmonic features and focus exclusively on harmonic similarity, research suggests that this type of listening requires conscious effort and is not the most common way of experiencing music. For instance, extraharmonic features have been found to be more perceptually salient than harmony (Cullimore, 1999;Farbood, 2012;Halpern, 1984;Mélen & Deliège, 1995;Poulin-Charronnat et al, 2004;Williams, 2005), and some of those features have been found to affect sensory (timbre; Beal, 1985;Cho et al, 1991) and long-term memory for harmony (rhythm;Jimenez & Kuusi, 2018). In the specific case of chord progressions, it can be argued that most listeners cannot easily associate two songs that use the same chord progression unless the songs share other musical features.…”

Section: Extra-harmonic Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Research does show that not all listeners experience harmony in the same way. For instance, musical training has been associated with greater attention (Farbood, 2012;Norgaard, 2017;Sears et al, 2014;Williams, 2005) and sensitivity to harmony (Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2009;Brattico et al, 2013;Corrigall & Trainor, 2009;Koelsch et al, 2002;Kopiez & Platz, 2009;Loui & Wessel, 2007;Steinbeis et al, 2006;Wolpert, 2000) as well as a greater ability to identify songs from their chord progressions (Jimenez & Kuusi, 2018). Additionally, the amount of improvisation that musicians have done (Goldman et al, 2020) and the specific pieces they have played (Cullimore, 1999;Jimenez & Kuusi, 2020) have also been found to affect how musicians perceive, remember, and conceptualize harmony.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Common Chord Progressions and Feelings of Remembering

2020

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Although Western tonal syntax can generate a very large number of chord successions of various lengths and degrees of complexity, some types of music, from Renaissance dances to recent pop, tend to rely more heavily on the repetition of relatively simple, short harmonic patterns. Doll recently identified short chord progressions commonly found in North American and British popular music and proposed that these chord progressions can be stored in long-term memory in the form of harmonic schemata that allow listeners to hear them as stereotypical chord progressions. However, considering the challenges that many listeners face when trying to consciously grasp harmony, it seems likely that the feelings of remembering chord progressions varies from listener to listener. To investigate these potential differences, we asked 231 listeners with various levels of musical training to rate their confidence on whether or not they had previously heard six diatonic four-chord progressions. To control for the effect of extra-harmonic features, we instantiated the chord progressions in a way that resembled the piano of a famous song and controlled for participants’ familiarity with that song and whether they had played its chords. We found that ratings correlated with typicality for the two groups of participants who had played an instrument for at least one year and to a lesser extent for the other participants. Additionally, all our players thought of specific songs more often and mentioned songs that better matched the stimuli in harmonic terms. What we did not find, however, was any effect associated to how long participants had played an instrument or the type of the instrument they had played. Our research supports the notion that both musical training and extra-harmonic features affect listeners’ feelings of remembering chord progressions.

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Connecting chord progressions with specific pieces of music

Jimenez

Kuusi

2017

Psychology of Music

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Musicians can conceptualize harmony in terms of its connection to specific pieces of music. However, research appears to indicate that harmony plays a relatively unimportant role in music identification tasks. The present study examines the ability of listeners of varying levels of musical expertise to identify music from chord progressions. Participants were asked to identify well-known classical and pop/rock pieces from their chord progressions, which were recorded using either piano tones or Shepard tones and were played at six transpositional levels. Although musical training and invariance of surface melodic and rhythmic features were found to have an advantageous effect on the identification task, even some non-musicians were able to identify music from chord progressions in conditions of low invariance of surface features. Implications of these results for our understanding of how listeners mentally represent and remember harmony are discussed.

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Effect of Music Training and Musical Complexity on Focus of Attention to Melody or Harmony

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

A descriptive study of high school and university students' focus of attention in fast and slow orchestral excerpts

A descriptive study of high school and university students' focus of attention in fast and slow orchestral excerpts

Common Chord Progressions and Feelings of Remembering

Connecting chord progressions with specific pieces of music

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