Memory for musical tones: the impact of tonality and the creation of false memories

Interaction of motor practice and memory training in expressive piano performance: expanding the possibilities of improvisation

This paper aimed to investigate the influence of motor practice and music performance experiences on musicians' auditory memory, the effect of auditory distinctiveness on melody recognition, and the differences in the working memory of classical and jazz pianists. The study was conducted among 26 jazz and 24 classical music students at Shenyang Conservatory of Music. To achieve the goal set, a melody recognition ability was analyzed after listening, performing without sound, and simultaneous listening and performing using computer recordings and pianist-taken notes. The study was conducted following repeated measures mixed design. The within-group variable was the learning condition. As the within-participant variable, the number of melody practicing trials was chosen. The type of influence on auditory memory was chosen as a between-group variable. The dependent variables were auditory recognition score, motor imagery ability, and auditory imagery ability. Students' recognition of the heard melodies was assessed by means of a 3-point Likert scale. Pearson's correlation coefficient was calculated to investigate the relationship between working memory and other student characteristics. The study outcomes unveiled that pianists are much better at recognizing tunes they generate themselves in auditory-motor practice than auditory practice alone. It was pointed out that the ability to recognize melody in auditory-motor learning is influenced by its acoustic characteristics. Hence, melodies that are slow in tempo and regular in time and intensity are easier to recognize than more variable pieces.

Generalizing across tonal context, timbre, and octave in rapid absolute pitch training

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma, they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave register. However, there is considerable variability in the literature in terms of how AP is trained and tested along these dimensions, making recent claims about AP learning difficult to assess. Here, we examined the effect of tonal context on participant success with a single-note identification training paradigm, including how learning generalized to an untested instrument and octave. We found that participants were able to rapidly learn to distinguish C from other notes, with and without feedback and regardless of the tonal context in which C was presented. Participants were also able to partly generalize this skill to an untrained instrument. However, participants displayed the weakest generalization in recognizing C in a higher octave. The results indicate that participants were likely attending to pitch height in addition to pitch chroma - a conjecture that was supported by analyzing the pattern of response errors. These findings highlight the complex nature of note representation in AP, which requires note identification across contexts, going beyond the simple storage of a note fundamental. The importance of standardizing testing that spans both timbre and octave in assessing AP and further implications on past literature and future work are discussed.

Magnetoencephalography recordings reveal the spatiotemporal dynamics of recognition memory for complex versus simple auditory sequences

Auditory recognition is a crucial cognitive process that relies on the organization of single elements over time. However, little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the conscious recognition of auditory sequences varying in complexity. To study this, we asked 71 participants to learn and recognize simple tonal musical sequences and matched complex atonal sequences while their brain activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Results reveal qualitative changes in neural activity dependent on stimulus complexity: recognition of tonal sequences engages hippocampal and cingulate areas, whereas recognition of atonal sequences mainly activates the auditory processing network. Our findings reveal the involvement of a cortico-subcortical brain network for auditory recognition and support the idea that stimulus complexity qualitatively alters the neural pathways of recognition memory.

EXPRESS: The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic Review and Future Directions

Music-related decision making encompasses a wide range of behaviours including those associated with composition and performance, listening choices, and decisions involving music education and therapy. Although research programmes in psychology and economics have contributed to an improved understanding of music-related behaviour, historically these disciplines have been unconnected. Recently however, researchers have begun to bridge this gap by employing tools from behavioural economics. This paper contributes to the literature by providing a discussion about the benefits of using behavioural economics in music-decision research. We achieve this in two ways. First, through a systematic review, we identify the current state of the literature within four key areas of behavioural economics - heuristics and biases, social decision making, behavioural time preferences, and dual-process theory. Second, taking findings of the literature as a starting point, we demonstrate how behavioural economics can inform future research. Based on this, we propose the Behavioural Economics of Music (BEM), an integrated research programme that aims to break new ground by stimulating interdisciplinary research in the intersection between music, psychology, and economics.

Atonal Music as a Model for Investigating Exploratory Behavior

Atonal music is often characterized by low predictability stemming from the absence of tonal or metrical hierarchies. In contrast, Western tonal music exhibits intrinsic predictability due to its hierarchical structure and therefore, offers a directly accessible predictive model to the listener. In consequence, a specific challenge of atonal music is that listeners must generate a variety of new predictive models. Listeners must not only refrain from applying available tonal models to the heard music, but they must also search for statistical regularities and build new rules that may be related to musical properties other than pitch, such as timbre or dynamics. In this article, we propose that the generation of such new predictive models and the aesthetic experience of atonal music are characterized by internal states related to exploration. This is a behavior well characterized in behavioral neuroscience as fulfilling an innate drive to reduce uncertainty but which has received little attention in empirical music research. We support our proposal with emerging evidence that the hedonic value is associated with the recognition of patterns in low-predictability sound sequences and that atonal music elicits distinct behavioral responses in listeners. We end by outlining new research avenues that might both deepen our understanding of the aesthetic experience of atonal music in particular, and reveal core qualities of the aesthetic experience in general.

Prediction under uncertainty: Dissociating sensory from cognitive expectations in highly uncertain musical contexts

Predictive models in the brain rely on the continuous extraction of regularities from the environment. These models are thought to be updated by novel information, as reflected in prediction error responses such as the mismatch negativity (MMN). However, although in real life individuals often face situations in which uncertainty prevails, it remains unclear whether and how predictive models emerge in high-uncertainty contexts. Recent research suggests that uncertainty affects the magnitude of MMN responses in the context of music listening. However, musical predictions are typically studied with MMN stimulation paradigms based on Western tonal music, which are characterized by relatively high predictability. Hence, we developed an MMN paradigm to investigate how the high uncertainty of atonal music modulates predictive processes as indexed by the MMN and behavior. Using MEG in a group of 20 subjects without musical training, we demonstrate that the magnetic MMN in response to pitch, intensity, timbre, and location deviants is evoked in both tonal and atonal melodies, with no significant differences between conditions. In contrast, in a separate behavioral experiment involving 39 non-musicians, participants detected pitch deviants more accurately and rated confidence higher in the tonal than in the atonal musical context. These results indicate that contextual tonal uncertainty modulates processing stages in which conscious awareness is involved, although deviants robustly elicit low-level pre-attentive responses such as the MMN. The achievement of robust MMN responses, despite high tonal uncertainty, is relevant for future studies comparing groups of listeners' MMN responses to increasingly ecological music stimuli.

Aggregate context effects in music processing

Control of stimulus confounds is an ever-present, and ever-important, aspect of experimental design. Typically, researchers concern themselves with such control on a local level, ensuring that individual stimuli contain only the properties they intend for them to represent. Significantly less attention, however, is paid to stimulus properties in the aggregate, aspects that, although not present in individual stimuli, can nevertheless become emergent properties of the stimulus set when viewed in total. This paper describes two examples of such effects. The first (Case Study 1) focuses on emergent properties of pairs of to-be-performed tones on a piano keyboard, and the second (Case Study 2) focuses on emergent properties of short, atonal melodies in a perception/memory task. In both cases these sets of stimuli induced identifiable tonal influences despite being explicitly created to be devoid of musical tonality. These results highlight the importance of monitoring aggregate stimulus properties in one's research, and are discussed with reference to their implications for interpreting psychological findings quite generally.

Naïve to expert: Considering the role of previous knowledge in memory

In humans, most of our new memories are in some way or another related to what we have already experienced. However, in memory research, especially in non-human animal research, subjects are often mostly naïve to the world. But we know that previous knowledge will change how memories are processed and which brain areas are critical at which time point. Each process from encoding, consolidation, to memory retrieval will be affected. Here, we summarise previous knowledge effects on the neurobiology of memory in both humans and non-human animals, with a special focus on schemas - associative network structures. Furthermore, we propose a new theory on how there may be a continuous gradient from naïve to expert, which would modulate the importance and role of brain areas, such as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

Tonal and textural influences on musical sight-reading

Two experiments investigated the impact of two structural factors-musical tonality and musical texture-on pianists' ability to play by sight without prior preparation, known as musical sight-reading. Tonality refers to the cognitive organization of tones around a central reference pitch, whereas texture refers to the organization of music in terms of the simultaneous versus successive onsets of tones as well as the number of hands (unimanual versus bimanual) involved in performance. Both experiments demonstrated that tonality and texture influenced sight-reading. For tonality, both studies found that errors in performance increased for passages with lesser perceived psychological stability (i.e., minor and atonal passages) relative to greater perceived stability (i.e., major passages). For texture, both studies found that errors in performance increased for passages that were more texturally complex, requiring two-handed versus one-handed performance, with some additional evidence that the relative simultaneity of note onsets (primarily simultaneous versus primarily successive) also influenced errors. These experiments are interpreted within a perception-action framework of music performance, highlighting influences of both top-down cognitive factors and bottom-up motoric processes on sight-reading behavior.

Atonal Music: Can Uncertainty Lead to Pleasure?

In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided view regarding the qualities of the aesthetic experience of music since Western art music from the 20th and 21st century like atonal music (AM) – while lacking a tonal hierarchical structure, and while being highly dissonant and hard to predict – is nevertheless enjoyed by a group of avid listeners. We propose a research focus that investigates, in particular, the experience of AM as a novel and compelling way with which to enhance our understanding of both the aesthetic appreciation of music and the role of predictive models in the context of musical pleasure. We use music theoretical analysis and music information retrieval methods to demonstrate how AM presents the listener with a highly uncertain auditory environment. Specifically, an analysis of a corpus of 100 musical segments is used to illustrate how tonal classical music and AM differ quantitatively in terms of both key and pulse clarity values. We then examine person related, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, that point to potential mechanisms underlying the appreciation and pleasure derived from AM. We argue that personality traits like “openness to experience,” the framing of AM as art, and the mere exposure effect are key components of such mechanisms. We further argue that neural correlates of uncertainty estimation could represent a central mechanism for engaging with AM and that such contexts engender a comparatively weak predictive model in the listener. Finally we argue that in such uncertain contexts, correct predictions may be more subjectively rewarding than prediction errors since they signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving.

False memories in music listening: exploring the misinformation effect and individual difference factors in auditory memory

The study of false memory has had a profound impact on our understanding of how and what we remember, as shown by the misinformation paradigm [Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory, 12(4), 361-366. doi: 10.1101/lm.94705 ]. Though misinformation effects have been demonstrated extensively within visual tasks, they have not yet been explored in the realm of non-visual auditory stimuli. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate whether post-event information can create false memories of music listening episodes. In addition, we explored individual difference factors potentially associated with false memory susceptibility in music, including age, suggestibility, personality, and musical training. In two music recognition tasks, participants (N = 151) listened to an initial music track, which unbeknownst to them was missing an instrument. They were then presented with post-event information which either suggested the presence of the missing instrument or did not. The presence of misinformation resulted in significantly poorer performance on the music recognition tasks (d = .43), suggesting the existence of false musical memories. A random forest analysis indicated that none of the individual difference factors assessed were significantly associated with misinformation susceptibility. These findings support previous research on the fallibility of human memory and demonstrate, to some extent, the generality of the misinformation effect to a non-visual auditory domain.

Collaborative Musical Creativity: How Ensembles Coordinate Spontaneity

Music performance is inherently social. Most music is performed in groups, and even soloists are subject to influence from a (real or imagined) audience. It is also inherently creative. Performers are called upon to interpret notated music, improvise new musical material, adapt to unexpected playing conditions, and accommodate technical errors. The focus of this paper is how creativity is distributed across members of a music ensemble as they perform these tasks. Some aspects of ensemble performance have been investigated extensively in recent years as part of the broader literature on joint action (e.g., the processes underlying sensorimotor synchronization). Much of this research has been done under highly controlled conditions, using tasks that generate reliable results, but capture only a small part of ensemble performance as it occurs naturalistically. Still missing from this literature is an explanation of how ensemble musicians perform in conditions that require creative interpretation, improvisation, and/or adaptation: how do they coordinate the production of something new? Current theories of creativity endorse the idea that dynamic interaction between individuals, their actions, and their social and material environments underlies creative performance. This framework is much in line with the embodied music cognition paradigm and the dynamical systems perspective on ensemble coordination. This review begins by situating the concept of collaborative musical creativity in the context of embodiment. Progress that has been made toward identifying the mechanisms that underlie collaborative creativity in music performance is then assessed. The focus is on the possible role of musical imagination in facilitating performer flexibility, and on the forms of communication that are likely to support the coordination of creative musical output. Next, emergence and group flow–constructs that seem to characterize ensemble performance at its peak–are considered, and some of the conditions that may encourage periods of emergence or flow are identified. Finally, it is argued that further research is needed to (1) demystify the constructs of emergence and group flow, clarifying their effects on performer experience and listener response, (2) determine how constrained musical imagination is by perceptual experience and understand people's capacity to depart from familiar frameworks and imagine new sounds and sound structures, and (3) assess the technological developments that are supposed to facilitate or enhance musical creativity, and determine what effect they have on the processes underlying creative collaboration.

The MUSOS (MUsic SOftware System) Toolkit: A computer-based, open source application for testing memory for melodies

Despite numerous innovative studies, rates of replication in the field of music psychology are extremely low (Frieler et al., 2013). Two key methodological challenges affecting researchers wishing to administer and reproduce studies in music cognition are the difficulty of measuring musical responses, particularly when conducting free-recall studies, and access to a reliable set of novel stimuli unrestricted by copyright or licensing issues. In this article, we propose a solution for these challenges in computer-based administration. We present a computer-based application for testing memory for melodies. Created using the software Max/MSP (Cycling '74, 2014a), the MUSOS (Music Software System) Toolkit uses a simple modular framework configurable for testing common paradigms such as recall, old-new recognition, and stem completion. The program is accompanied by a stimulus set of 156 novel, copyright-free melodies, in audio and Max/MSP file formats. Two pilot tests were conducted to establish the properties of the accompanying stimulus set that are relevant to music cognition and general memory research. By using this software, a researcher without specialist musical training may administer and accurately measure responses from common paradigms used in the study of memory for music.