Melody Recognition: Effects of Articulation Format

Melody Recognition: Effects of Articulation Format Stephen Wee Hun Lim (gmslwhs@nus.edu.sg) Winston D. Goh (psygohw@nus.edu.sg) Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore Block AS4, 9 Arts Link, Singapore117570 interpretation of that rendition. While Raffman (1993) has suggested that only the abstract structural information is encoded into long-term memory (LTM), others have reported that surface features, such as timbre (e.g., Peretz, Gaudreau, & Bonnel, 1998) and tempo (e.g., Halpern and Mullensiefen, 2008), are also encoded into LTM during a melody recognition task. In music, the way a melody is articulated shapes its surface appearance. In the extant literature that examined the effects of surface characteristics on melody recognition performance, it is surprising that no study has explored the effects of articulation format, even though it is a feature that is commonly manipulated by both composers and performers. Trained musicians commonly define articulation as whether the music (e.g., melody) is played in a legato (i.e., continuous) or staccato (i.e., detached) format. Because no one has studied the influence of articulation on melody recognition, our initial motivation was to add to that literature. Thus far, memory representations that subserve explicit recognition of melodies appear to be formed by a highly specialized association that binds together characteristics such as timbre and tempo with melody identity. It is thus attractive to ask whether the articulation feature is tied to a melody’s identity and computed during the perceptual analysis of the melodic input. By addressing this question, we hope to explicate more fully the central idea that variability in surface features, along with the idealized canonical structure of music, is important in music perception and processing. To examine the effects of articulation format on melody recognition, we designed the melody to occur either fully in legato form, fully in staccato form, or in mixed articulation format (i.e., a combination of legato and staccato components). When the melody was played in staccato form, the duration of each note in the melody was manipulated to last 10% of the full duration when the note was played in legato form. The schematic of the eight different articulation formats is shown in Figure 1. These formats are coded as l, s, a, b, c, d, e, and f: The legato and staccato formats are abbreviated as format l and s, respectively, while the six mixed-articulation formats follow an alphabetical system of coding for ease of reference. Each set of four boxes represents sequentially the four bars of the melody respectively. Taking format f for instance, the melody opens in staccato form (i.e., the notes of the melody are articulated by the instrument in a disjointed fashion) for the first bar, switches to legato form (i.e., the notes are now articulated smoothly Abstract Various surface features – timbre, tempo, and pitch – influence melody recognition memory, but articulation format effects, if any, remain unknown. For the first time, these effects were examined. In Experiment 1, melodies that remained in the same, or appeared in a different but similar, articulation format from study to test were recognized better than were melodies that were presented in a distinct format at test. A similar articulation format adequately induced matching. Experiment 2 revealed that initial perceptual (dis)similarity as a function of the location of articulation (mis)match between two instances of the melody did not accurately determine discrimination performance. An important boundary condition of the matching process was defined: Whether matching occurs depends on the physical quantity, rather than location, of fit between the memory trace and the recognition probe, suggesting a global matching advantage effect. Keywords: Melody recognition memory; articulation format effects; global matching advantage Introduction When we hear a piece of music, we detect and occasionally remember phrases, motifs, themes, syncopations, suspensions, tonic chords, cadences, and so on. We recognize the instrument playing the melody, or even identify with the emotions of the specific musician performing the work. To this end, what exactly is the nature of mental representations that underlie the music experience? To address this question, it is useful to first recognize that there are two kinds of information in music, namely abstract structure and surface characteristics (Trainor, Wu, & Tsang, 2004). The abstract structure entails the relative pitches and ratios of the durations between adjacent musical notes, regardless of the individual note’s absolute pitch level or length per se. Surface characteristics, in contrast, contain the non-structural aspects of the music, such as absolute pitch, tempo, and timbre. Both the abstract structure and surface characteristics contribute towards musical interpretation. Representing the abstract structure enables recognition of a melody across different performances, and musical variations of a motif within a musical composition (Large, Palmer, & Pollack, 1995). For example, Happy Birthday retains its identity and is readily recognized even when it is played or sung in various keys and tempos, or by different voices or instruments. Yet, these very surface characteristics lead us to identify the specific musician and unique performance of the work, defining the emotional