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BECOMING AN ENCULTURATED LISTENER cont'd. The purpose of this set of experiments is to determine when listeners become familiar with musical structures that are conventional or typical in a particular culture. Listeners include children 5 to 12 years of age and musically trained and untrained adults. Participants hear a “standard” five-tone musical sequence and are required to detect a subtle mistuning of one tone in a “comparison” sequence. Standard patterns differ in adherence to Western musical structure. In one condition, the standard is a Western musical prototype (i.e., a broken major triad). In other conditions, the prototype is distorted such that all pitch distances between tones are reduced or increased by a factor of 20%. Preliminary results reveal that 10 to12-year-old children are better than adults at detecting changes to the distorted stimuli. In other words, greater musical enculturation appears to result in a reduced ability to process and remember non-native musical structures. Moreover, musical enculturation appears to be a relatively slow and protracted process compared to language acquisition.
This set of experiments is designed to examine children's memory for familiar songs (i.e., melodies) presented without vocals. Melodies are a particularly interesting domain of study because they are defined solely by relational information (relations between tones in terms of their pitch and duration values), rather than absolute information. For example, songs can be sung in a high or a low voice--or fast or slow--and still maintain their identity. In short, songs are abstractions. These experiments test whether young children's representations of familiar songs are relatively inflexible compared to those of older children and adults, and therefore linked more closely to absolute information. For example, young children may find it particularly difficult to recognize the tune of Happy Birthday when it is played in an extremely high or an extremely low pitch register, or if it is played very fast or very slow. With increasing age, however, we expect that children's representations will become progressively more flexible and abstract. These experiments are conducted in collaboration with Sandra Trehub.
THE IMPACT OF MUSIC LESSONS ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT Although there has been much speculation in the media about proposals
that “music makes you smarter,” actual empirical evidence is in
short supply. In a set of recent experiments (Nantais & Schellenberg, 1999; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2001), my colleagues and I have shown that the short-term Mozart effect is simply an artifact of arousal and mood. We are now examining whether the effect is better attributed to arousal or mood. To examine whether music lessons impact positively on nonmusical aspects of cognitive development, I am currently conducting three studies. One is an experiment in which 6-year-olds have been assigned at random to weekly keyboard, vocal, or drama classes (or no lessons) for 1 year. A second study is correlational, testing for the possibility that years of music lessons in childhood are associated with nonmusical benefits. The third study is a quasi-experiment, which is testing the cognitive abilities of children recruited from different pre-existing groups (a children's choir, a chess & math club, sports teams, or no extra-curricular activities).
CHILDREN AND ADULTS: NAME THAT TUNE This series of experiments follows up from Schellenberg et al. (1999), who reported that adults could identify extremely brief excerpts from recordings (1/10 of a second) at levels far better than chance. In subsequent studies, we are testing whether the presence of vocals facilitates or hinders performance. Preliminary findings indicate that vocals facilitate performance (or have little effect) with excerpts of 1/5 of a second. For briefer excerpts, however, the presence of vocals appears to be detrimental to performance.We are also examining the ability of 2- and 3-year-olds to identify brief segments taken from TV theme songs (Teletubbies, Barney, Sesame Street). To date, we have observed remarkably good performance: Even 2-year-olds can do the task with excerpts as brief as 3 seconds. Margaret McKinnon and Sandra Trehub are collaborators on the the adult and child experiments, respectively.
EFFECTS OF AGING AND MUSICAL TRAINING ON Participants in this study include younger and older adults, and musically trained and untrained young adults. The purpose is to determine how aging and experience affect relatively low-level music-perception abilities. Each participant is tested on a variety of tasks, including auditory inspection time (speed of auditory processing), frequency discrimination, and relative pitch discrimination. The goal is to determine whether aging and experience affect performance differentially across tasks. For the younger and older adults, auditory-threshold testing will ensure that the results are not an artifact of differences in hearing abilities. For the musically trained and untrained adults, potential differences in general cognitive abilities will be partialled out in the statistical analyses. The aging study is conducted in collaboration with Takeo Noda and Bruce Schneider.
ABSOLUTE PITCH: A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE These experiments use perceptual tasks to ask whether musically untrained
children and adults encode information about absolute pitch in memory. |
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