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Related Experiment Videos

Memory for musical surface.

C L Krumhansl1

  • 1Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853.

Memory & Cognition
|July 1, 1991
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Listeners accurately recognized musical segments and generalized to new parts of a piece, indicating strong memory for surface characteristics. However, they focused on contour and global correlations, not strict compositional rules.

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Area of Science:

  • Music cognition
  • Auditory memory
  • Compositional analysis

Background:

  • Music is characterized by intricate compositional principles.
  • Understanding how listeners perceive and remember music is crucial for music cognition research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate listeners' memory for musical surface characteristics.
  • To determine if listeners can generalize memory to unfamiliar sections of a piece.
  • To explore the criteria listeners use for abstracting musical information.

Main Methods:

  • Listeners were presented with the first half of a piano piece by O. Messiaen.
  • Participants judged whether test excerpts belonged to the heard or unheard portions of the piece.
  • Four types of transformed segments were used to assess abstraction criteria.

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Main Results:

  • Listeners demonstrated accurate recognition of familiar segments and generalization to unfamiliar sections.
  • Performance indicated listeners primarily relied on contour and global parameter correlations, not specific compositional couplings.
  • Even trained musicians did not identify strict adherence to the piece's compositional constraints.
  • Repeated hearings did not significantly alter performance.

Conclusions:

  • Listeners possess robust auditory memory for music's surface features, including generalization.
  • Perceptual abstraction of musical characteristics is based on contour and broad correlations, not rigid compositional rules.
  • Sensitivity to specific compositional constraints is limited, even among experts.