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Scale-sensitivity: A cognitive resource basic to music perception.

Tyler Dean1, Charles Chubb1

  • 1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697-5100, USA.

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|October 2, 2017
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Listeners possess a unified "scale sensitivity" skill for distinguishing musical scales. This cognitive resource impacts performance across various semitone tasks, with varying effectiveness depending on the musical interval.

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Area of Science:

  • Auditory perception
  • Psychoacoustics
  • Music cognition

Background:

  • Previous research demonstrated a bimodal distribution in classifying major vs. minor tone-scrambles.
  • The nature of the skill underlying this classification remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the cognitive resource responsible for classifying tone-scrambles.
  • To determine if a single skill underlies performance across different musical intervals.

Main Methods:

  • Participants classified tone-scrambles with a fixed tonic (G) and varying target notes across five "semitone" tasks.
  • Performance was measured by the accuracy of target note classification in each task.

Main Results:

  • Performance varied across tasks, being best in the "2", "3", and "6" tasks, intermediate in the "4" task, and worst in the "7" task.
  • A single cognitive resource model accurately described the performance across all five tasks.

Conclusions:

  • A unified cognitive resource, termed "scale sensitivity," underlies performance in these musical tasks.
  • "Scale sensitivity" appears to provide general awareness of scale variations relative to a fixed tonic.