Implicit Cultural Knowledge
-Knowledge that is not always available to conscious thought
Diatonic Scale Step -all whole steps
Chromatic Scale Step
-all semitones or half steps
Infancy and Music
-Infants treat melodies with the same melodic contour Pup and down pattern) as the same and respond to the similarity of rhythmic patterns even across changes of tempo -The child’s cognition of musical patterns contains the seeds of the adult’s cognition
Prenatal Experience
-The fetus is responsive to sounds as early as the second trimester
-Mother’s characteristic patterns of pitch and stress accents spoken repeatedly during the third trimester were better preferred by babies.
Study: DeCasper and Spence’s Newborns Stories
-Children suck on a blind nipple to hear a children’s story
-Children that heard the story in the womb sucked more to hear the story, whereas children who had not been read stories in the womb had no preference
-Babies who had been read stories in the womb liked speech that was low-pass filtered as much as normal unfiltered speech, whereas babies who had not been read to did not.
Perceptual Grouping
-Just as adults segregate a sequence of notes alternating between pitch and streams, so do infants.
Study: Thorpe and Trehub’s Six-Note Sequences
-Infants are played AAAEEE and are trained to move their head whenever they hear a change in the music
-The infants noticed changes when they occurred within groups, but not between groups
Pitch
-Infant pitch perception is accurate and displays octave equivalence just like adults
-Adults have pitch constancy, and infants have it too P7 or 8 months old)
-Just like adults, infants have difficulty discerning the pitch when the harmony present is high in frequency and remote from the frequency of the missing fundamental
-Infants 7-10 months old can discriminate direction of pitch change for intervals as small as one half-step/semitone.
Melodic Pitch Patterns
-Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star is played for the babies
-If it is changed by 3 semitones but the pitch is not changed, they did not notice
-But, if the melody is shifted 3 semitones in pitch and its contour is altered, the babies show a heart-rate deceleration “startle response”
-For babies and adults, the transposition sounds like the same old melody again, whereas the different contour melody sounds new.
-From Trehub and Thorpe’s studies, they show that infants, like adults, encode and remember the contours of melodies they hear.
Pitch Class
-A set of all pitches that are a whole number of octaves apart -ex: the pitch class Cs in all octaves
Study: Standard Western Diatonic Scales
-7 to 11 and 12 month olds found it easier to detect the diatonic patterns than the nondiatonic patterns
-But, 6 month olds performed equally well with diatonic and nondiatonic patterns
-i.e. the younger infants were not yet accustomed to the standard western diatonic scale whereas older infants were
Perfect Fifth
-Between C and G
-The fundamental building block for all countries
-Gestalt theorists call this “good” pattern construction
Childhood
-During their second year, children begin to recognize certain melodies as stable entities in their environment and can identify them even after a considerable delay
Childhood Singing
-Children begin to sing spontaneously between the age of 9 months and a year. -At 18 months, the child generates recognizable, repeatable songs
-At two years old, the child repeats brief phrases over and over again.
-Child songs are unlike adult songs because they lack a stable pitch framework
-At age 5, children are able to produce easily recognizable versions of songs
Absolute Pitch
-The ability to identify pitches by their note names even in the absence of musical context
-Only occurs in 4-8% of musicians; quite rare
-Not necessary for being able to play music
-Most children have the underlying ability for acquiring absolute pitch
-Takeuchi and Hulse say that absolute pitch can be acquired by anyone but only during the critical period during the fifth or sixth year
-With a moderate amount of training, people develop a “temporary and local” sense of absolute pitch that leads them to encode what they hear and produce in terms of the tonal framework provided by the current context
Residual Absolute Pitch
-Adults are typically able to approximate the pitch levels of familiar songs
-Ex: Levitin’s study; young adults sang popular songs they only heard once at approximately the correct pitch level
Melodic Contour and Tonality
- to 6 year olds: capable of recognizing melodies on the basis of contour
- to 6 year olds: performed equally well at recognizing familiar versions of both tonal and atonal imitations
-7 and 8 year olds: tonality begins to be a factor
-9 and 10 year olds: a difference appears between familiar versions and same-contour imitations -5-year-olds rely principally on key distance, whereas 8-year-olds can use both key distance and interval changes to reject a same-contour imitation
-Babies can distinguish pitch contours and produce single pitches.
-The scale system develops during the elementary school years and confers on tonal materials an advantage in memory that remains in adulthood.
Atonal
-a mess of notes that do not sound good together
Interval
-the space between two notes or two tones
Study: Zenatti’s Tonal Scale Framework
-5-year-olds performed at about chance with both tonal and atonal stimuli
-6-10 year olds had better performance for tonal sequences
-12 year olds, processing of the atonal sequences caught up
Study: Trainor and Trehub’s Tonality in Pitch Change
-5-year olds have implicit knowledge of key membership but not of implied harmony, whereas 7-year-olds, like adults, have implicit knowledge of both aspects of musical structure.
-7-year-olds could tell when a melody had been switched in midstream from one key to another or from the major mode to the minor.
Rhythm
- the development of the ability to control attention in relation to the temporal sequence of events, using regularities in the rhythm of occurrence of critical features in a piece to aim attention at important elements
- the development of the ability to remember and reproduce rhythmic patterns-by the age of 5, the child is quite sophisticated in rhythm.
-rhythm is not easily separable from other aspects of structural organization in a song; melody is intertwined with rhythm
Andrews and Dowling’s “Hidden Melodies Task”
-by the age of 9 or 10, the separation of pitch ranges confers an advantage
-ability to aim attention in time improves steadily from age 6 on
Drake’s 5-year-old Rhythm Task
-5-year-olds can reproduce rhythms with two levels of organization: a steady beat and varying subdivisions of the beat
-They find binary patterns Pin two’s) easier than ternary patterns Pin three’s)
-By age 7, children improve and gain greater rhythmic complexity
Accent Structure
-children at the age of 5 are responding to more than one level of rhythmic organization so that the songs they learn are processed as wholes and not by one level at a time
Emotion
-During preschool years, children learn to identify emotions in songs and music and this ability improves during the school years
-In western music, major modes evoke happy emotions and minor modes evoke sadness -8 year olds and adults, but not 5 year olds, applied happy and sad emotions consistently to excerpts in the major and minor modes
Adulthood Nonmusicians:
-do not find contour recognition difficult but do find interval recognition more difficult
-are just as good with tonality, but perform worse with atonal melodies
-are just as error prone as musicians when dealing with quarter steps in Eastern music.
Tonic
-the first degree of the scale
-in a C-major scale, the tonic is C
Dominant
-the fifth degree of the scale
-in a C-major scale, the dominant is G
Dowling’s Study for Context of Chords
-Listeners with a moderate amount of training of music performed much worse with changed context
-Nonmusicians remembered the melody independent of its relation to the context
-Professional musicians performed very well in both changed and unchanged contexts