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

Eighty-one listeners defined by three age ranges (18–30, 31–59, and over 60 years) and three levels of musical experience performed an immediate recognition task requiring the detection of alterations in melodies. On each trial, a brief melody was presented, followed 5 sec later by a test stimulus that either was identical to the target or had two pitches changed, for a same–different judgment. Each melody pair was presented at 0.6 note/sec, 3.0 notes/sec, or 6.0 notes/sec. Performance was better with familiar melodies than with unfamiliar melodies. Overall performance declined slightly with age and improved substantially with increasing experience, in agreement with earlier results in an identification task. Tempo affected performance on familiar tunes (moderate was best), but not on unfamiliar tunes. We discuss these results in terms of theories of dynamic attending, cognitive slowing, and working memory in aging.

Levels-of-processing effects on "remember" responses in recognition for familiar and unfamiliar tunes

We investigated the effect of level-of-processing manipulations on “remember” and “know” responses in episodic melody recognition (Experiments 1 and 2) and how this effect is modulated by item familiarity (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants performed 2 conceptual and 2 perceptual orienting tasks while listening to familiar melodies: judging the mood, continuing the tune, tracing the pitch contour, and counting long notes. The conceptual mood task led to higher d' rates for “remember” but not “know” responses. In Experiment 2, participants either judged the mood or counted long notes of tunes with high and low familiarity. A level-of-processing effect emerged again in participants’ “remember” d' rates regardless of melody familiarity. Results are discussed within the distinctive processing framework.

Aging and experience in the recognition of musical transpositions

The authors examined the effects of age, musical experience, and characteristics of musical stimuli on a melodic short-term memory task in which participants had to recognize whether a tune was an exact transposition of another tune recently presented. Participants were musicians and nonmusicians between ages 18 and 30 or 60 and 80. In 4 experiments, the authors found that age and experience affected different aspects of the task, with experience becoming more influential when interference was provided during the task. Age and experience interacted only weakly, and neither age nor experience influenced the superiority of tonal over atonal materials. Recognition memory for the sequences did not reflect the same pattern of results as the transposition task. The implications of these results for theories of aging, experience, and music cognition are discussed.

The Role of Features and Context in Recognition of Novel Melodies

WE INVESTIGATED HOW WELL STRUCTURAL FEATURES such as note density or the relative number of changes in the melodic contour could predict success in implicit and explicit memory for unfamiliar melodies. We also analyzed which features are more likely to elicit increasingly confident judgments of "old" in a recognition memory task. An automated analysis program computed structural aspects of melodies, both independent of any context, and also with reference to the other melodies in the testset and the parent corpus of pop music. A few features predicted success in both memory tasks, which points to a shared memory component. However, motivic complexity compared to a large corpus of pop music had different effects on explicit and implicit memory. We also found that just a few features are associated with different rates of "old" judgments, whether the items were old or new. Rarer motives relative to the testset predicted hits and rarer motives relative to the corpus predicted false alarms. This data-driven analysis provides further support for both shared and separable mechanisms in implicit and explicit memory retrieval, as well as the role of distinctiveness in true and false judgments of familiarity.