Scale and contour: Two components of a theory of memory for melodies.

Abstract

This article develops a two-component model of how melodies are stored in longand short-term memory. The first component is the overlearned perceptual-motor schema of the musical scale. Evidence is presented supporting the lifetime stability of scales and the fact that they seem to have a basically logarithmic form cross-culturally. The second component, melodic contour, is shown to function independently of pitch interval sequence in memory. A new experiment is reported, using a recognition memory paradigm in which tonal standard stimuli are confused with same-contour comparisons, whether they are exact transpositions or tonal answers, but not with atonal comparison stimuli. This result is contrasted with earlier work using atonal melodies and shows the interdependence of the two components, scale and contour.Remembering melodies is a basic process in the music behavior of people in all cultures. This behavior may involve production, as with the singer performing a song for an audience or the participant in a significant social event trying to remember the appropriate song. Or it may involve recognition, as with the listener whose comprehension of the later developments in a piece depends on memory for earlier parts. In this article, I concentrate on two components of memory that contribute to the reproduction and recognition of melodies, namely, melodic contour and the musical scale. I maintain that actual melodies, heard

The Perception of Tonal Structure Through the Differentiation and Organization of Pitches.

“…Although we have derived tonal magnitude as a power transformation of the standardized key profile, on reflection it is clear that tonal magnitude is in many ways comparable to the more familiar concept of tonal strength. Research on tonal strength has occupied a central place in work on musical cognition, with such investigations extensively studying, for example, the consequences of varying tonal strength on the processing of and memory for musical passages (e.g., Croonen, 1994Croonen, , 1995Cuddy, Cohen, & Mewhort, 1981;Cuddy, Cohen, & Miller, 1979;Cuddy & Lyons, 1981;Dowling, 1978Dowling, , 1991. In addition, this work has identified characteristics that make a passage tonally strong, with music heard as tonally strong if it (a) is diatonic, in that it is composed primarily of pitches of the diatonic set; (b) begins and ends on the tonic; and (c) exhibits cadential structure (e.g., contains a sequence of chords built on Pitch Class 0, followed by Pitch Class 7, and ending on Pitch Class 0).…”

Auditory attention to frequency and time: an analogy to visual local–global stimuli

“…This distinction was originally proposed by Dowling (1978) and has received some support at a cognitive level in subsequent work on memory for previously heard melodic patterns (see Dowling & Harwood, 1986, for an early review). Scale refers to the specific set of pitches or tones (7 of 12 semitones of the octave) that are used to construct a melody in Western tonal-harmonic music, along with the set of intervals that can be created between these tones.…”

Implicit learning of tonality: A self-organizing approach.

“…Beyond the tonal hierarchy, melodic contour (the up and down movement of pitches in a melody) is a crucial feature for melody recognition. Although the model does not at present include pitch height or contour, the purpose of this last simulation was to investigate the extent to which the network may account for results obtained in experiments involving melodies, such as those reported by Dowling (1978).…”

“…The simulations were run with pairs of melodies (Dowling, 1978, Figure 3) consisting of the standard melody followed by one of the four experimental conditions: "exact transposition," "tonal answer," "atonal contour foil," and "random foil." The network was presented with the standard melody immediately followed by the comparison.~l To compare human and network performance, the phasic activation received by the tone layer in the exact transposition condition (following the presentation of the standard and its exact transposition) was correlated with the phasic activation received by the tone layer in each of the three "different" conditions.…”