The Influence of Metre, Mode, Interval Type and Contour in Repeated Melodic Free-Recall

Abstract

Twenty-five undergraduates learned to sing 16 original melodies through repeated listenings over a five-week period. Each original melody was composed so as to possess only one of two possible conditions of metre, mode, melodic contour, and interval type. In a free-recall task, the frequency and quality of subjects' reliance on the four variables to organise the melodies for recall were measured. The response pattern made it possible to infer the relative importance of categorical organisation (a semantic memory strategy) in music cognition. Subject recall revealed the existence of melody clusters based on the experimental conditions. Over the five-week period, the predominant musical elements used by subjects for categorisation appeared to change. This change is evident in the strong negative correlations between metre and mode used in the early trials versus contour and interval type used in the later trials. These results suggest that cognitive categorisation is undertaken during the learning of melodies and that contour and interval-type are comparatively important memory characteristics. This experiment provides evidence of cognitive changes over time, consistent with a process musicians often call "internalising" a musical work. Specifically, our experiment suggests that the repeated act of performing a piece of music, without the aid of written notation nor language based instruction, can lead to substantive changes in an individual's internal representation of that melody's primary features.