The relationship between musical skills, music training, and intonation analysis skills

Few attempts have been made to look systematically at the relationship between musical and intonation analysis skills, a relationship that has been to date suggested only by informal observations. Following Mackenzie Beck (2003), who showed that musical ability was a useful predictor of general phonetic skills, we report on two studies investigating the relationship between musical skills, musical training, and intonation analysis skills in English. The specially designed music tasks targeted pitch direction judgments and tonal memory. The intonation tasks involved locating the nucleus, identifying the nuclear tone in stimuli of different length and complexity, and same/different contour judgments. The subjects were university students with basic training in intonation analysis. Both studies revealed an overall significant relationship between musical training and intonation task scores, and between the music test scores and intonation test scores. A more detailed analysis, focusing on the relationship between the individual music and intonation tests, yielded a more complicated picture. The results are discussed with respect to differences and similarities between music and intonation, and with respect to form and function of intonation. Implications of musical training on development of intonation analysis skills are considered. We argue that it would be beneficial to investigate the differences between musically trained and untrained subjects in their analysis of both musical stimuli and intonational form from a cognitive point of view.