Familiarity of Western melodies: An exploratory approach to influences of national culture, genre and musical expertise

Abstract

It is unknown to what extent listeners in different Western countries share long-term representations of melodies as well as their genre associations, and whether such knowledge is modulated through music training. A group of German listeners ( N = 40) rated their familiarity with 144 melody excerpts from different genres implicitly (melody structure) and explicitly (melody title). Melodies were identical to those used in a previous Franco-Canadian study (Peretz, Babaï, Lussier, Hébert, & Gagnon, 1995). In addition, melodies were attributed by the participants to predefined genre categories, and similarities between pairs of melodies were computed, using an algorithm by Müllensiefen and Frieler (2006). Results revealed patterns of (un)familiarity, which, in part, deviated from the previous study. Melodies from classical, ceremonial, and – to a lesser extent – children’s songs categories were rated as most familiar, whereas traditional and more recent francophone tunes from mixed categories were judged as unfamiliar. Music training had no significant influence on implicit memory for melodies but rather on explicit knowledge of their titles. Computational analyses suggest that highly familiar and highly unfamiliar tunes share structural features with melodies belonging to the same category, whereas dissimilarities were detected between certain clusters of genre categories. Taken together, these results suggest that long-term representation of melodies is influenced by a listener’s (Western) national background. Representations are differently affected by specific genres but only partially influenced by music training and by structural properties.