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1978, Perception & Psychophysics
Journal of experimental psychology. General
Music perception and octave generalization in rhesus monkeys2000 •
Two rhesus monkeys were tested for octave generalization in 8 experiments by transposing 6- and 7-note musical passages by an octave and requiring same or different judgments. The monkeys showed no octave generalization to random-synthetic melodies, atonal melodies, or individual notes. They did show complete octave generalization to childhood songs (e.g., "Happy Birthday") and tonal melodies (from a tonality algorithm). Octave generalization was equally strong for 2-octave transpositions but not for 0.5- or 1.5-octave transpositions of childhood songs. These results combine to show that tonal melodies form musical gestalts for monkeys, as they do for humans, and retain their identity when transposed with whole octaves so that chroma (key) is preserved. This conclusion implicates similar transduction, storage, processing, and relational memory of musical passages in monkeys and humans and has implications for nature-nurture origins of music perception.
1987 •
The psychology of music has the potential to make great contributions to knowledge of cognition in general because musical stimuli come from a natural and highly structured domain, (as do the linguistic stimuli normally used in cognitive research), and yet they lack the referential meaning of linguistic stimuli. This lack of reference by musical stimuli to entities outside the musical domain should make it easier to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms by which structured and patterned stimuli are manipulated than is the case with linguistic stimuli. Yet there is not a single result from the psychology of music that is generally regarded as illuminating basic cognitive mechanisms. The ability to discriminate two melodies as differing or identical is arguably the most basic musical task. I have concentrated on that task in this research. Modern research on melody discrimination dates from 1960 and yet the literature reporting that research is quite small with only a limited number of investigators. The effects and theoretical models reported have been specific to the musical domain with almost no appeal to any general cognitive mechanisms. I believe that because of this the field is seen as peripheral to the advance of cognition, very few researchers are attracted to it, and hence the rate of progress is low. In order to unlock the potential of the psychology of music this area of research must be tied back to general cognition. In my review of previous research I have identified the lack of a sophisticated theoretical framework and adequate experimental and data analytic methodologies as the key factors preventing rapid progress in this field. Therefore, the aim of my research has been threefold: to develop an adequate theoretical framework that will serve as a bridge from musical phenomena to concepts from general cognition; to develop sophisticated methods of data analysis that allow much more fine-grained analyses of data than are currently possible in order to investigate the proposed framework; and to conduct empirical investigations in order to explore the consequences of the framework, test the new data analyses, and to discover new, more subtle effects than those previously reported, to serve as the starting points for further investigation. The framework that I have proposed is based on the distinction between attributes describing a melody and the units in which those attributes are organised. This distinction is commonly acknowledged in models of cognitive representations and yet it has not been made at all in previous melody discrimination research. That research appears to have identified the attribute with the units, as exemplified by the assertion that "well-known melodies must be stored as sequences of pitch intervals between successive notes" (Dowling, 1978, p. 346). My framework makes it clear that the issue of what information is stored (attributes) can be investigated independently of the issue of how that information is organised in the representation (units). Another point which is made clear by my framework is the need for some mechanism to ensure that corresponding units are compared in the process of comparing the representations of two melodies. In my fourth experiment I discovered a pair of melodies in which non-corresponding units were compared. This problem of matching corresponding units for comparison is likely to exist in all cognitive domains. Thus this is an area in which the psychology of music could elucidate a general cognitive mechanism. In my review of the methodology used in melody discrimination research I found that there were characteristics of the melodic domain that made traditional means of analysis particularly inappropriate. There are marked differences in the psychological characteristics of individual melodies and there are also idiosyncratic interactions of subjects with melodies. Another previously unrecognised problem is that it is literally impossible to generate musical stimuli in such a way as to avoid confounding. I refer to this characteristic as obligatory confounding. These characteristics reduce the utility of traditional analyses which aggregate data over melodies and analyse them in terms of fixed orthogonal factors. However, the major problem with previous analyses is that they are carried out at the level of groups of melody pairs rather than at the single pair level. That is, measures of discriminability could not be derived for single pairs of melodies. Thus the discriminabilities could only be analysed and explained in terms of the summary properties of groups of melody pairs rather than the properties of individual melodies involved in individual judgments. I have developed an extension to signal detection analysis that allows the discriminability of individual melody pairs to be calculated. These discriminabilities can then be analysed and interpreted in terms of the characteristics of the particular melodies involved. Thus, I have developed a technique to allow melody discrimination phenomena to be examined at a far finer level of resolution than was previously possible. Using this technique I have demonstrated several previously unknown effects and the number of effects found appears to have been limited primarily by the quantity of data collected. In my first experiment I was attempting to find clues to the existence of previously unreported effects for further investigation in the subsequent experiments. The effect which I found and chose to pursue was the increased saliency of changes occurring at a contour reversal. This experiment also demonstrated effects related to the overall contour shape, a particular pitch transition, the pitch range, and cadence. The second and third experiments further investigated the contour reversal effect. This effect was convincingly demonstrated in these experiments while I developed my methods of data analysis. The third experiment also demonstrated effects associated with the repetition of a note across a contour reversal and with rhythmic stress. In my fourth experiment I used the methodology that I had developed to attack directly the question of the relative importance of interval-based and note-based attributes. This experiment demonstrated that simple measures of the number of notes and interval changed are inadequate to account for melody discrimination performance. I found effects related to repetition across a contour reversal, the tonic, the major triad, the unusuality of particular pitch transitions, and the process of matching of corresponding units. These effects were more naturally described in terms of note-based attributes than interval-based attributes. Thus, the research reported here has accomplished my original aims of developing a framework, developing a methodology, and demonstrating novel effects with that framework and methodology. However, the most important aspect of this work is that it provides a significant break from previous work and acts as a starting point from which to develop the area of melody discrimination research in the manner which it deserves.
1979 •
Subjects listened to a standard six-tone melody, followed by a comparison melody. The comparison melody was always transposed up four semitones from the standard, and this transposition was either exact or it was inexact while maintaining contour. Subjects judged whether or not the comparison melody formed an exact transposition of the standard. It was found that repetition of the standard melody, before presentation of the comparison, resulted in a significant improvement in performance compared with a condition featuring only a single presentation of the standard. A significant improvement also resulted when the repeated melody was displaced intact an octave higher or an octave lower. However, when the standard melody was repeated such that its components were displaced alternately to the higher and lower octaves, performance was significantly worse than when the standard melody was not repeated at all. Thus, in this paradigm, octave equivalence effects for single tones did not operate in the consolidation of melodic information.
1973 •
An experiment is described with demonstrates that certain highly specific disruptive effects in immediate memory for tonal pitch generalize across octaves. Pitch recognition was required after a retention interval during which six other tones were played. The effects of including in the interpolated sequence tones which were removed by exactly an octave from those which had already been demonstrated to produce disruption were investigated. Generalization of these interference effects was found to result both from tones which were displaced an octave higher and (to a lesser extent) from tones which were displaced an octave lower. It is concluded that the memory store that retains information concerning the pitch of individual tones is bidimensional in nature, both “tone height” and“tone chroma” being represented.
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2006 •
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Proceedings of the first ACM international conference on Digital libraries - DL '96
Towards the digital music library1996 •
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