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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/27877
Title: | Memory for temporally nonadjacent tonal centers mediated by musically salient features |
Authors: | Spyra, Joanna |
Advisor: | Woolhouse, Matthew |
Department: | Psychology |
Keywords: | memory;music;nonadjacent key relationship;surface features;harmony;time decay |
Publication Date: | 2022 |
Abstract: | Research on memory often describes the remarkable longevity of music. However, memory for music is not uniform. Cook (1987) found that participants were not able to tell apart excerpts that modulated from those that did not when the excerpt was longer than 1 minute in length. This suggests that participants were no longer able to remember, and compare, musical keys after a relatively short period of time. Farbood (2016) and Woolhouse et al. (2016) further explored the limitations of memory for tonal structures finding that, in fact, harmonic memory only lasts up to 21 seconds after modulation. However, this research was done using homophonic stimuli—arpeggios or quarter-note chords—that may not be representative of the music participants would be listening to regularly. The focus of this project was to explore how the addition of certain musical features, such as melodic or rhythmic figurations, may influence harmonic memory. Observing these possible influences may provide us with insight into the processes responsible for auditory memory and how it differs from other domains, such as speech or vision. Chapter 1 explores prominent memory literature and music cognition experiments that support, or address concerns with, common memory models. Here, I introduce a cognitive system which reconciles music research with models by memory specialists such as Baddeley and Snyder. Chapter 2 presents a detailed account of background empirical literature, including Farbood (2016) and Woolhouse et al. (2016). Though fundamental to the exploration of temporally nonadjacent harmonic memory, this research is potentially limited in its generalizability due to the homophonic nature of the stimuli. Chapter 3 explores this limitation by testing the effects of adding surface features—melodic and rhythmic components often used for elaboration in composition—on memory for large-scale tonal structures. Results found that harmonic memory is, indeed, enhanced and prolonged by these elaborative components, lasting up to 33 seconds, well past the limit found in previous research. Farbood (2016) further claimed that harmonic memory is significantly interrupted by new, highly harmonic excerpts. However, results from Woolhouse et al. (2016), Spyra et al. (2021) and those from Chapter 3 all question this claim as they employed stimuli that was highly harmonic. Chapter 4 investigates the contradiction by testing whether functional diatonic, functional chromatic, or random sequences degraded harmonic memory for an original key. Functional diatonic intervening information resulted in increased harmonic memory, directly contradicting Farbood’s original findings. In Chapter 5, these results are explored in terms of prominent memory models in the field of cognition, supporting standard models of memory such as that by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) or Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), as well as my proposed cognitive system. This is further elaborated by discussing the process of undergoing a musical judgement task from perception through to decision-making. In summary, this project suggests that more generalizable stimuli containing realistic musical features produce a significant boost in harmonic memory. Furthermore, this arguably calls into question standard practices in analysis that categorize surface features as hierarchically less important than ’deeper’ harmonic events, and thus, potentially less important from a cognitive perspective. Which is to say, this evidence suggests that these features may play a vital role in remembering nonadjacent harmonic structures. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/27877 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Spyra_Joanna_M_2022Sept_PhD.pdf | 4.49 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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