Memory for musical surface

This study of memory for music presented listeners with the first half of a short piano piece, O. Messiaen's Mode de valeurs et d'intensités. The piece is written according to a unique compositional principle that rigidly couples values of pitch (chroma and octave), duration, and dynamics. Listeners heard test excerpts, which were judged in terms of whether or not they might have come from the piece (either from the part they had heard or from the remainder of the piece). Even in the first block of trials, listeners were able to recognize segments from the part of the piece they had heard, suggesting surprisingly accurate memory for surface characteristics. Listeners were also able to generalize to the rest of the piece, accurately judging segments from the part of the piece they had not heard. However, performance on four kinds of transformed segments showed that the abstraction of a piece's surface characteristics adopts rather loose criteria. Even highly trained professional musicians informed of the compositional constraints before the experiment were not sensitive to the specific couplings between musical parameters. Rather, listeners appeared to be sensitive to contour (the pattern of increasing and decreasing pitch) and global correlations between pitch height and duration, dynamics, and interval size. Performance did not change with repeated hearings of the music.