Musical change deafness: The inability to detect change in a non-speech auditory domain

Musical Change Deafness: The Inability to Detect Change in a Non-speech Auditory Domain Kat R. Agres (kra9@cornell.edu) Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Uris Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Carol L. Krumhansl (clk4@cornell.edu) Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Uris Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Abstract schematically (Snyder, 2000), with only general characteristics and certain salient features remembered. One result of an efficient, schematic memory of music is that certain types of changes can go unnoticed. This draws a parallel to work done in vision concerning the inability to detect a change within a visual scene, called change blindness (for a review, see Simons & Rensink, 2005). Research in this area has demonstrated that changes to more salient aspects of a scene (such as those that may comprise a gist) are detected more frequently than peripheral changes (Rensink, 2002). Though the change blindness paradigm has recently been extended to the tactile modality (Gallace, Tan, & Spence, 2006; Gallace, Auvray, Tan, & Spence, 2006), surprisingly little research has investigated change deafness, the auditory analog of this phenomenon, despite clear evidence that memory for auditory details is fallible (Vitevitch, 2003; Eramudugolla, Irvine, McAnally, Martin, & Mattingley, 2005). Because change blindness is a robust phenomenon that addresses perception, memory, and attention, the present research sought to examine whether similar processing occurs within the non-speech auditory modality. Of the few studies examining change deafness in the auditory domain, none have systematically investigated music. Vitevitch (2003) demonstrated that listeners display significant levels of change deafness for detecting a different speaker during a lexical shadowing task. Speech can be useful for studying the mechanisms of change deafness, but instrumental music has the advantage that it is free of explicit semantic content. As a consequence, studying music has the potential to uncover basic auditory mechanisms without the influence of external reference. Thus, music is an ideal stage for testing whether the mechanisms underlying change blindness extend more broadly to auditory perception. When an acoustic event is actively given attention, change deafness should be less frequent than when the sound is in the perceptual background. In instrumental music, certain notes comprise the foundation of the melody, while others are ‘passing tones’, generally of less emphasis and importance to the musical phrase. The following studies provide evidence that foundational and emphasized elements of music are more likely to be stored in short-term This article presents two experiments investigating the degree to which listeners can detect changes in melodies. In both studies, pairs of melodies were presented to a group of professional musicians and a group of non-musicians. In Experiment 1, musical structure and musical expertise were explored with stylistic, non-stylistic, and random melodies. Experiment 2 utilized a full-factorial design to examine tonality, musical interval, metrical position, note duration, and musical expertise. Significant effects were found for several variables, but tonality had a particularly large effect on performance. Under some conditions, large changes between the melodies went undetected even by professional musicians. These results suggest that listeners form a memory representation for schematically consistent tones, which we refer to as the musical gist . These results also suggest a comparison with change blindness, in which viewers can fail to notice salient changes in a visual scene, raising the question of whether similar processing operates in both modalities. Keywords: change deafness; change detection; auditory gist; musical memory Introduction In this article, we present two experiments demonstrating that large changes in music can go undetected. Intuition suggests that our auditory perception of the world is not always robust and complete. Picture a scenario in which you are so involved in a conversation that it is not until several minutes have passed that you notice music playing in the background. It is not difficult, either, to imagine being oblivious to auditory changes in the environment, such as the sound of cars braking at a traffic light. It is likely that we often selectively process and remember what might be called the 'auditory gist' of a scene (see Harding, Cooke, & Konig, 2007). There is evidence that listeners also form a gist when listening to music. Although some musical features seem to be encoded veridically, like the particular quality (or timbre) of a singer’s voice, other musical features, such as pitch and rhythm, are not always remembered in detail (e.g., Levitin, 2002). A professional musician, for example, is not always able to reproduce a novel melody immediately after hearing it. Instead, musical information is often encoded