Identification of speeded and slowed familiar melodies by younger, middle-aged, and older musicians and nonmusicians.

Abstract

There is a range of tempos within which listeners can identify familiar tunes (around 0.8 to 6.0 notes/s). Faster and slower tunes are difficult to identify. The authors assessed fast and slow melodyidentification thresholds for 80 listeners ages 17-79 years with expertise varying from musically untrained to professional. On fast-to-slow (FS) trials the tune started at a very fast tempo and slowed until the listener identified it. Slow-to-fast (SF) trials started slow and accelerated. Tunes either retained their natural rhythms or were stylized isochronous versions. Increased expertise led to better performance for both FS and SF thresholds (r = .45). Performance declined uniformly across the 62-year age range in the FS condition (r = .27). SF performance was unaffected by age. Although early encoding processes may slow with age, expertise has a greater effect. Musical expertise involves perceptual learning with melodies at a wide range of tempos.The slowing of certain cognitive processes with age is a welldocumented phenomenon (Salthouse, 1996a(Salthouse, , 1996b. Tasks that show this effect include verbal and visual memory, judgment, mental arithmetic, and tests of spatial ability. Research in this area has generally been concerned with how fast people of different ages could accomplish information-processing tasks. With increasing age from around 20 years there is a gradual, steady decline in the speed of performance of speeded tasks. However, researchers have seldom asked how slowly people could perform tasks that require slow performance to be effective. For example, certain pieces of music are more effective when slow, though performing a piece extremely slowly, yet coherently, can be very difficult. Elisabeth GrUmmer and Wilhelm Furtw~ingler's 1954 performance of the aria "Und ob die Wolke sie verhtille (And Even When the Clouds Hide It)" from Weber's Der Freischiitz (The Freeshooter) owes much of its unique beauty to the especially slow tempo that they achieve. And there are situations where it is necessary to speak at an unusually slow tempo in order to be understood, as when talking with someone with a severe hearing loss or someone with only a beginning grasp of the language or when lecturing to a class with only a beginning grasp of the subject matter.Several theoretical accounts have been developed to explain the slowing of cognitive processing with age. The simplest hyMelinda W. Andrews, W. Jay Dowling, and James C. Bartlett, Programs in Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Texas at Dallas; Andrea R. Halpern, Department of Psychology, Bucknell University.This research was supported by National Institute on Aging Grant 1-R01-AG09965. We thank Laura Straiter for assistance in data collection, Janie Jury for assistance in preparing the figure, and Bruno Repp and Richard Warren for helpful and thought-provoking comments.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to W. Jay Dowling, Programs in Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, Texas 7...

Melody recognition at fast and slow tempos: Effects of age, experience, and familiarity

“…Of particular interest here is that the reduction in range for older participants was mostly in the fast end of the spectrum. This finding agrees with that of Andrews et al (1998), in that the identification threshold for fast melodies shifted with age, but the identification threshold for slow melodies did not.…”

“…At very slow rates, earlier elements are likely to be lost from WM by the time later elements are processed, making access to the entire sequence difficult. However, Andrews et al (1998) found no such effect. Therefore, the cognitive slowing hypothesis appears to provide a better explanation of our earlier results than do the general effects of a WM deficit.…”

“…The two tunes were presented at very fast, moderate, or very slow tempos (6 notes/sec, 3 notes/sec, or 0.6 note/sec, respectively). The fastest and slowest tempos were thus in the neighborhood of the fast and slow thresholds obtained by Andrews et al (1998) and Warren et al (1991) as well as of the fastest and slowest viable tempos found by McAuley et al (2006) for older participants. Listeners had to discriminate exact repetitions of targets from highly similar lures in which the melodic-rhythmic contours were preserved but in which the pitches of two notes were changed.…”

“…Despite the appeal of the cognitive slowing account, we were concerned that Andrews et al (1998) used only familiar tunes in their identification paradigm. Doing so may have reduced the load on WM and obscured the effects of a WM deficit that the use of novel melodies might have brought to light.…”

“…They found a different pattern from the steady slowing of the preferred tempo: The range was relatively small in Andrews et al (1998). In both studies, correlations were calculated using age in years and four experience levels: inexperienced, 2-5 years of musical training, 5 years of musical training, and professional.…”