Search results for "Melody"
showing 10 items of 43 documents
Cross-cultural music cognition: cognitive methodology applied to North Sami yoiks
2000
This article is a study of melodic expectancy in North Sami yoiks, a style of music quite distinct from Western tonal music. Three different approaches were taken. The first approach was a statistical style analysis of tones in a representative corpus of 18 yoiks. The analysis determined the relative frequencies of tone onsets and two- and three-tone transitions. It also identified style characteristics, such as pentatonic orientation, the presence of two reference pitches, the frequency of large consonant intervals, and a relatively large set of possible melodic continuations. The second approach was a behavioral experiment in which listeners made judgments about melodic continuations. Thr…
Personality and music preferences: the influence of personality traits on preferences regarding musical elements.
2005
The purpose of this scientific study was to determine how personality traits, as classified by Cattell, influence preferences regarding musical elements. The subject group consisted of 145 students, male and female, chosen at random from different Polish universities. For the purpose of determining their personality traits the participants completed the 16PF Questionnaire (Cattell, Saunders, & Stice, 1957; Russel & Karol, 1993), in its Polish adaptation by Choynowski (Nowakowska, 1970). The participants' musical preferences were determined by their completing a Questionnaire of Musical Preferences (specifically created for the purposes of this research), in which respondents indicated their…
Expectancy in Sami Yoiks revisited: The role of data-driven and schema-driven knowledge in the formation of melodic expectations
2009
This study extends a previous study concerning melodic expectations in North Sami yoiks (Krumhansl et al., 2000) in which a comparison between expert and non-expert listeners demonstrated the existence of a core set of principles governing melodic expectancies. The previous findings are reconsidered using non-Western listeners (traditional healers from South Africa) in a modeling investigation. Comparison of different models made it possible to separate the role of data-driven and schema-driven models in melodic expectancies and to reveal any possible Western bias in previous studies. The results of the experiment, in which African listeners rated the fitness of probe-tones as continuation…
Outcome of lower-risk patients with myelodysplastic syndromes without 5q deletion after failure of erythropoiesis-stimulating agents
2017
Purpose Most anemic patients with non-deleted 5q lower-risk myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are treated with erythropoiesis-stimulating agents (ESAs), with a response rate of approximately 50%. Second-line treatments, including hypomethylating agents (HMAs), lenalidomide (LEN), and investigational drugs, may be used after ESA failure in some countries, but their effect on disease progression and overall survival (OS) is unknown. Here, we analyzed outcome after ESA failure and the effect of second-line treatments. Patients and Methods We examined an international retrospective cohort of 1,698 patients with non-del(5q) lower-risk MDS treated with ESAs. Results Erythroid response to ESAs was 6…
Expressive timing facilitates the neural processing of phrase boundaries in music: Evidence from event-related potentials
2013
The organization of sound into meaningful units is fundamental to the processing of auditory information such as speech and music. In expressive music performance, structural units or phrases may become particularly distinguishable through subtle timing variations highlighting musical phrase boundaries. As such, expressive timing may support the successful parsing of otherwise continuous musical material. By means of the event-related potential technique (ERP), we investigated whether expressive timing modulates the neural processing of musical phrases. Musicians and laymen listened to short atonal scale-like melodies that were presented either isochronously (deadpan) or with expressive tim…
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians
2016
The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to our knowledge, no systematic assessments of AT have been performed using laboratory tasks comparable to those assessing absolute pitch. In the present study, we operationalize AT as the ability to identify and reproduce tempo in the absence of rhythmic or melodic frames of reference and assess these abilities in musically trained and untrained participants. We asked 15 musicians and 15 non-musician…
Long-term melodic expectation: The unexpected observation of distant priming effects
2009
The report provides a brief account of an experiment whose control conditions produced interestingly counter-intuitive results. The method adapted priming techniques to explore whether imagining well-known melodies would facilitate perceptual discrimination of congruent compared to incongruent melodic continuations in a syllable identification task. This was shown to be the case, but in a subsequent control experiment, imagining an irrelevant lure melody also showed a priming effect. The persistent priming effect apparently related the target sequence to the aurally presented, nonadjacent opening notes, and not to the intervening mental image. A number of statistical analyses of the pitch …
Modeling a Melody Recognition Task using a Cohort Network
2009
Dalla Bella, Peretz, and Aronoff studied the effects of musical familiarity on melody recognition by comparing performance between musicians and nonmusicians in a melody gated-presentation (MGP) task. They identified three events in this task which were the familiarity emergence point (FEP), the isolation point (IP), and the recognition point (RP). The FEP occurred earlier in musicians than nonmusicians, but the IP occurred earlier in nonmusicians. Finally, the RP occurred slightly earlier in musicians. We simulated the qualitative results of the MGP task using a connectionist simulation of the cognitive processes underlying the emergence of these three events. We call this a melody cohort …
Processing of melodic contours in urethane-anaesthetized rats
2007
The human brain can automatically detect changes even in repeated melodic contours of spectrally varying sounds. However, it is unclear whether this ability is specific to humans. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) in urethane-anaesthetized Wistar rats presented with rare pairs of tones ('deviants') interspersed with frequently repeated ones ('standards'). The frequency of the tones varied nonsystematically across their pairs so that deviants stood out from standards only in the melodic ordering (ascending or descending) of the tones of a pair. We found that the absolute amplitude of the ERP was significantly higher to deviants than standards between 106 and 136 ms from the onset o…
More About the Musical Expertise of Musically Untrained Listeners
2003
Several behavioral experiments that were designed to compare the abilities of musicians and nonmusicians to process subtle changes in musical structures are surveyed. These experiments deal with different aspects of music perception including the processing of melodic and harmonic structures, the processing of large-scale structures, and implicit learning. In all these experiments, the so-called nonmusician listeners behaved in a very similar way as did highly trained students from music conservatories and music departments. This outcome suggests that when the experimental setting requires participants to process musical structures (in contrast to musical tones), the large audience of untra…