Serial processing in melody identification and the organization of musical semantic memory

Abstract

Unlike the visual stimuli used in most object identification experiments, melodies are organized temporally rather than spatially. Therefore, they may be particularly sensitive to manipulations of the order in which information is revealed. Two experiments examined whether the initial elements of a melody are differentially important for identification. Initial exposures to impoverished versions of a melody significantly decreased subsequent identification, especially when the early exposures did not include the initial notes of the melody. Analyses of the initial notes indicated that they are differentially important for melody identification because they help the listener detect the overall structure of the melody. Confusion errors tended to be songs that either were drawn from the same genre or shared similar phrasing. These data indicate that conceptual processing influences melody identification, that phrase-level information is used to organize melodies in semantic memory, and that phrase-level information is required to effectively search semantic memory.

The cohort model of melody identification: Evaluating primacy and similarity

“…However, identification performance was relatively flat through the 1-5-9, 2-6-10, and 3-7-11 conditions, so it would be difficult to argue that there was a strong relationship between similarity and identification performance. The confusion error data matched those observed in previous work in that approximately half of the errors were of one of two types (Schulkind, 2004). Genre errors were numerous, but are difficult to interpret because only a small number of genres were used in the experiment.…”

“…Only melodies that are musically similar to the target initially enter (access) and subsequently remain (selection) in the active cohort. Data reported by Schulkind (2004) bear on the similarity hypothesis. He found that confusion errors -misidentifying a target melody as a different song -were relatively rare (< 10% trials) and that the majority of errors bore no musical similarity to the target.…”

Semantic priming of familiar songs

“…People can process tunes on the basis of musical qualities, as well, such as key, rhythm, and so forth (see, e.g., Halpern, 1984b;Schulkind, 2004). Nonetheless, the ease with which people treat familiar songs on the basis of conceptual similarities (Halpern, 1984a) and the priming based on these conceptual similarities, as shown here, present strong evidence that meaning may dominate both the organization of familiar music and the functionality of memory for music.…”

“…Other evidence strengthens this general conclusion; for example, Schulkind (2004) noted a high rate of genre confusions in his study of identification of familiar melodies. These thematic-based errors were nearly as common as phrasing/meter errors, although the latter were substantially more relevant to the participants' task.…”

“…The presence of errors of a semantic nature, even when it was not necessary to process this dimension of the music in order to complete the task (Schulkind, 2004), is suggestive of automatic semantic processing. A more direct way to explore the nature and automaticity of the associations between songs, as well as between the different components of songs (lyrics, melodies, genres, etc.…”