Serial position effects in a singer's long term recall identify landmarks and lacunae in memory

Abstract

An experienced singer learned Stravinsky’s Ricercar 1, for soprano and small instrumental ensemble for public performance and annotated copies of the score to indicate the location of musical features that she attended to during practice and performance cues that she attended to during performance. During the next five years, she wrote out the words and music from memory six times. Recall was initially perfect, but declined over time as portions of the piece were progressively forgotten. Landmarks in recall were marked by a sharp increase in the probability of recall followed by a gradual, linear decrease as the serial cuing of successive bars broke down. Landmarks occurred at important points in the music (structural boundaries and interpretive performance cues) where retrieval cues provided content addressable access to memory, allowing the singer to restart the chain of associations after interruption by a gap where the music was forgotten. Lacunae occurred at places where the singer attended to the other musicians (shared performance cues for arrival/off). The probability of recall progressively decreased in bars preceding lacunae and then increased again in the bars that followed. Serial position effects in her written recall of the score thus revealed which aspects of the music the singer had attended to during practice.