Acquiring music information : An incidental learning approach.

This thesis contains my empirical works resulting from three years of studying contingency learning, that is the human ability to learn regularities between two or more events, applied to music. Learning music requires time and effort. However, many skills can be automatized in less time-consuming and effortful ways. Indeed, some research suggests that many elements of music knowledge are mostly implicitly acquired. In Chapter 1, the potential benefit of using an incidental learning procedure to automatize musical sub-skills useful for sight-reading and for pitch identification is discussed. In Chapter 2, the first set of experiments investigate whether an incidental contingency learning ta…