Tonal memory

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In music, tonal memory or "aural recall" is the ability to remember a specific tone after it has been heard. [1] Tonal memory assists with staying in tune and may be developed through ear training. Extensive tonal memory may be recognized as an indication of potential compositional ability. [2]

Contents

Tonal memory may be used as a strategy for learning to identify musical tones absolutely. Although those who attempt the strategy believe they are learning absolute pitch, the ability is generally not musically useful, [3] and their absolute tonal memory declines substantially or completely over time if not constantly reinforced. [4]

When listening to music, tones are stored in short-term memory as they are heard. This allows sequences of tones, such as melodies, to be followed and understood. There is evidence that a specialized short-term memory system exists for tones, and that it is distinct from short-term verbal memory. [5]

Research Findings

In the research article "Memory for musical tones: the impact of tonality and the creation of false memories", [6] Dominique Vuvan and her researchers did three experiments that are focused on music memory specifically single tones with a tonal melodic condition. [6] The result of the first experiment revealed that the responses of test subjects that listened to isochronous tones revealed quality remembrance in expected and unexpected targets in major tonal context compared to moderately expected targets. [6] Vuvan's second experiment used minor melodies that hindered tonal anticipation due to how minor tonality can simultaneously be presented in three forms. [6] The final experiment used atonal melodies that showed how participants were struggling to decipher each musical tone due to the absence of tonal structure. [6]

Lilach's research, along with her colleagues, aimed to experiment on how working memory fully functions when combining memorized music information. In the first experiment, there were nine tone sequences that played at five-hundred meters per second, and it performed five percent more precisely than the nine tone sequences that played at one-thousand meters per second. [7] The second experiment did not have any effective observation of short sequences. This had an opposite reaction, which is why this showed how long term sequences at a faster rate performed better than at a shorter rate. [7] Short sequences were remembered more accurately compared to long sequences that were slow and at a fast rate. [7]

Williamson and her associates created an experiment focused on the study of short-term memory using a structure of working memory to see how distinct and similar verbal and tonal information is processed. This experiment studied amateur musicians' short memory by utilizing visual-auditory senses. [8] It was discovered that irrelevant tones disrupted memory for sequences of tones while irrelevant speech disrupted memory for the sequence of letters. Using the visual-auditory method was proved to be a practical tool for related studies of short term-memory for verbal and tonal medium. [8]

Two researchers Farbood and Mavromatis studied on how tonal conditions influence pitch recognition. This test used melodic sequences in a pitch memory test that is formed on the delayed-tone recognition paradigm. [9] The results of the test showed that many factors such as interference tone, degree of tonality, and tonal fitness of comparison tone showed to be a key factor in how listeners performed in the task. [9]

Vispoel's research journal described an adaptable test that is for tonal memory. There are three phases that were created in order to get the results. The first phase created four to nine notes to provide reliable scores. [10] The second phase used the test to run and evaluate in a computer simulation analysis. [10] Lastly, in the third phase the test was field-tested on the PLATO computer system, and showed that it required an average tonal memory test scores of 6.05, 8.55, and 11.60 items to reach reliabilities of .80, .85, and .90 (4). [10]

Experiments

In the research conducted by Vuvan and her associates, the first experiment aimed to figure out whether the expectancies that are made by tonal melody will affect the memory for single tones. Twenty people were enlisted to be part of the experiment where four of the twenty participants had no musical training at all. [6] These participants listened to an American melody in G-major and right after heard a single probe tone. [6] They were then asked to state whether the probe tone that was heard was in the melody that was previously played. There were a total of 216 trials made to complete the first experiment. [6] In the second experiment, a new group of twenty participants was selected but they all have had years of musical training. [6] The procedure is exactly the same as the first experiment, but the main difference is that the melody is now presented in a minor key. Lastly, the third experiment with a new set of participants who also have experience in musical training. [6] Again, the procedure is the same as experiments one and two but the key difference is that they used an atonal melody for these participants to listen to.

Lilach's and her associates conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, eight undergraduate students were selected who had no musical training at all. They listened to pairs of isochronous tone sequences while simultaneously doing a task to see how accurate they were at completing the task. [7] In the second experiment, nine new test subjects that are undergraduate students were selected and had the same procedure as the first experiment, but with the exception of the length of the sequences that they will be hearing. [7]

The experiment Williamson conducted involved thirty-two people who were considered amateur musicians and had at least eight years of training whether it be instrument or vocal. Each participant had four practice runs and sixteen trials in four different blocks. The four blocks were either silent, white noise, irrelevant tones, or irrelevant spoken digits. [8]

Farbood and Mavromatis's experiment had thirty-four participants who were musicians and had years of formal music training. These participants were on a website that gave multiple-choice questions on every sixty melodic sequences that they had to answer and state from a scale of 1-5 where 1 is "Not tonal" and 5 being "Clearly tonal". After this, all the answers would then be assessed to see how accurate and precise they are for each sequence. In the next experiment, 48 new participants participated in a pitch memory experiment. This new group of people had a mix of musicians and non-musicians. These participants had a survey to take on a computer and also listened to the sixty melodic sequences had to figure out if the first pitch they heard is the same or different from the final pitch that they heard while also only hearing each pitch only once. [9]

Vispoel's research experiment had over 125 people, where 4 were graduate students and the rest being undergraduate students. These participants had to take four versions of a tonal memory test and a questionnaire. Each tonal memory test had 60 items of different types of tones to hear and answer. There were two professional musicians to help ensure that these tests were accurately classifying the tonal and atonal pitches. Each test was unique and had different combinations although it used the same melodies. The session was taken in groups of 5 to 25. There was a practice test given before the actual tests and had a 15 min break after taking the first two versions of the test. [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Melody</span> Linear succession of musical tones in the foreground of a work of music

A melody, also tune, voice or line, is a linear succession of musical tones that the listener perceives as a single entity. In its most literal sense, a melody is a combination of pitch and rhythm, while more figuratively, the term can include other musical elements such as tonal color. It is the foreground to the background accompaniment. A line or part need not be a foreground melody.

Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labeling, associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atonality</span> Music that lacks a tonal center or key

Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. Atonality, in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a single, central triad is not used, and the notes of the chromatic scale function independently of one another. More narrowly, the term atonality describes music that does not conform to the system of tonal hierarchies that characterized European classical music between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. "The repertory of atonal music is characterized by the occurrence of pitches in novel combinations, as well as by the occurrence of familiar pitch combinations in unfamiliar environments".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music theory</span> Study of the practices and possibilities of music

Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory". The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation ; the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tonality</span> Musical system

Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is called the tonic. The root of the tonic chord forms the name given to the key, so in the key of C major, the note C is both the tonic of the scale and the root of the tonic chord. Simple folk music songs often start and end with the tonic note. The most common use of the term "is to designate the arrangement of musical phenomena around a referential tonic in European music from about 1600 to about 1910". Contemporary classical music from 1910 to the 2000s may practice or avoid any sort of tonality—but harmony in almost all Western popular music remains tonal. Harmony in jazz includes many but not all tonal characteristics of the European common practice period, usually known as "classical music".

Ear training or aural skills is a music theory study in which musicians learn to identify pitches, intervals, melody, chords, rhythms, solfeges, and other basic elements of music, solely by hearing. The application of this skill is analogous to taking dictation in written/spoken language. As a process, ear training is in essence the inverse of sight-reading, the latter being analogous to reading a written text aloud without prior opportunity to review the material. Ear training is typically a component of formal musical training and is a fundamental, essential skill required in music schools.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Set theory (music)</span> Branch of music theory

Musical set theory provides concepts for categorizing musical objects and describing their relationships. Howard Hanson first elaborated many of the concepts for analyzing tonal music. Other theorists, such as Allen Forte, further developed the theory for analyzing atonal music, drawing on the twelve-tone theory of Milton Babbitt. The concepts of musical set theory are very general and can be applied to tonal and atonal styles in any equal temperament tuning system, and to some extent more generally than that.

In European art music, the common-practice period is the era of the tonal system. Most of its features persisted from the mid-Baroque period through the Classical and Romantic periods, roughly from 1650 to 1900. There was much stylistic evolution during these centuries, with patterns and conventions flourishing and then declining, such as the sonata form. The most prominent, unifying feature throughout the period is a harmonic language to which music theorists can today apply Roman numeral chord analysis.

Auditory imagery is a form of mental imagery that is used to organize and analyze sounds when there is no external auditory stimulus present. This form of imagery is broken up into a couple of auditory modalities such as verbal imagery or musical imagery. This modality of mental imagery differs from other sensory images such as motor imagery or visual imagery. The vividness and detail of auditory imagery can vary from person to person depending on their background and condition of their brain. Through all of the research developed to understand auditory imagery behavioral neuroscientists have found that the auditory images developed in subjects' minds are generated in real time and consist of fairly precise information about quantifiable auditory properties as well as melodic and harmonic relationships. These studies have been able to recently gain confirmation and recognition due to the arrival of Positron emission tomography and fMRI scans that can confirm a physiological and psychological correlation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Level (music)</span>

A level, also "tonality level", Gerhard Kubik's "tonal step," "tonal block," and John Blacking's "root progression," is an important melodic and harmonic progression where melodic material shifts between a whole tone above and a whole tone below the tonal center. This shift can occur to both neighboring notes, in either direction, and from any point of departure. The steps above and below the tonic are often called contrasting steps. A new harmonic segment is created which then changes the tonality but not necessarily the key.

Diana Deutsch is a British-American psychologist from London, England. She's a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music. Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions. She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitches in memory, and how people relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch, which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages. Deutsch is the author of Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain (2019), the Psychology of Music, and also the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003).

Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andalusian cadence</span>

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Melody type or type-melody is a set of melodic formulas, figures, and patterns.

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The speech-to-song illusion is an auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1995. A spoken phrase is repeated several times, without altering it in any way, and without providing any context. This repetition causes the phrase to transform perceptually from speech into song.

References

  1. ↑ Gorow, Ron (2002). Hearing and Writing Music: Professional Training for Today's Musician (2nd Edition). ISBN   978-0-9629496-7-8.
  2. ↑ Haroutounian, Joanne (2002). Kindling the Spark : Recognizing and Developing Musical Talent. ISBN   978-0-19-512948-9.
  3. ↑ Bachem, A. (1940). "The genesis of absolute pitch". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 11 (4): 434–439. Bibcode:1940ASAJ...11..434B. doi:10.1121/1.1916056.
  4. ↑ Meyer, M. (1899). "Is the memory of absolute pitch capable of development by training?". Psychological Review. 6 (5): 514–516. doi:10.1037/h0069034. Full text
  5. ↑ Deutsch, Diana. "Short Term Memory for Tones". DianaDeutsch. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Vuvan, Dominique T.; Podolak, Olivia M.; Schmuckler, Mark A. (2014). "Memory for musical tones: the impact of tonality and the creation of false memories". Frontiers in Psychology. 5: 582. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00582 . ISSN   1664-1078. PMC   4054327 . PMID   24971071.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Akiva-Kabiri, Lilach; Vecchi, Tomaso; Granot, Roni; Basso, Demis; Schön, Daniele (2009). "Memory for tonal pitches: a music-length effect hypothesis". Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1169: 266–269. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04787.x. ISSN   1749-6632. PMID   19673790. S2CID   32505831.
  8. 1 2 3 Williamson, Victoria J.; Mitchell, Tom; Hitch, Graham J.; Baddeley, Alan D. (2010-06-11). "Musicians' memory for verbal and tonal materials under conditions of irrelevant sound". Psychology of Music. 38 (3): 331–350. doi:10.1177/0305735609351918. ISSN   0305-7356. S2CID   146624519.
  9. 1 2 3 "APA PsycNet". psycnet.apa.org. Retrieved 2020-04-29.
  10. 1 2 3 4 Vispoel, Walter P. (1993). "The Development and Evaluation of a Computerized Adaptive Test of Tonal Memory". Journal of Research in Music Education. 41 (2): 111–136. doi:10.2307/3345403. ISSN   0022-4294. JSTOR   3345403. S2CID   144616202.
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