Studies in Musical Cognition: Comments from a Music Theorist

Abstract

This article is in three parts. First, four common misconceptions in the psychological literature with regard to the perception of and memory for tonal tunes are isolated and documented. They are (1) that tonal strength is proportional to tune length, (2) that tonality is equivalent to diatonicism, (3) that frequency (pitch) distance is directly proportional to tonal functional distance, and (4) that melodic structure consists only (or mainly) of the note-to-note contour of a melody. Counterexamples to each of these misconceptions are given, forming a framework for a discussion of some of the fundamental properties of tonality. Part two is a brief criticism of short-term recognition paradigms and their use in research on melodies. Part three discusses the limited literature on long-term memory for tunes. The author proposes three modes of long- term memory representations for tunes: images ("visual" shapes), sequences of events ("episodes" of tune-specific contexts), and hierarchic rule-governed structures. It is suggested that the modes may, themselves, constitute a hierarchy, and that accessibility of a given representation is crucially dependent on the requirements of the task and the choice of an appropriate retrieval strategy.