Effects of aging on processing of novel musical structure

Musical processing involves long-term memory representations of invariant properties of auditory patterns and working memory representations of patterns heard in the present moment. Musical scales are formalized sets of pitches on which much of musical composition and improvisation is based, and frequency relations among scale notes are invariant within categorical boundaries. Studies of young adults have indicated that adjustments of frequency relations are better detected when melodies are based on culturally familiar scales than on culturally unfamiliar scales. A proposed account for this finding has been that knowledge about musical frequency relations is stored in long-term memory. In the present study, old and young adults performed equivalently well in detection of frequency relation adjustments in a culturally familiar scale context, but young adults performed better than old adults in culturally unfamiliar scale contexts. The performance of old adults in a culturally unfamiliar scale context was correlated with high-frequency (8 kHz) hearing sensitivity. These findings suggest that influences of aging on processing of auditory events involve relations of auditory cognition and hearing sensitivity.