Tacit tonality - Implicit learning of context-free harmonic structure

Musical knowledge, like native language knowledge, is largely implicit, being represented without awareness of its complex structures and incidentally acquired through interaction with a large number of samples. Two experiments explore implicit learning of hierarchical harmonic structures of different complexity employing an artificial grammar learning paradigm. The experiments consisted of an incidental learning phase using a distraction task, and a testing phase employing the process dissociation procedure paradigm (Jacoby, 1991). Participants performed significantly above chance and recognised adjacent and long-distance dependencies in both experiments. Confidence ratings and inclusion/e…