Cue weighting and task processing in melodic classification

Abstract

Many studies have considered the role of diverse musical parameters in the perception and cognition of specific musical contexts, yet few attempts have been made to integrate these findings into a general cognitive overview of everyday music listening. This study shifted the focus of research, by considering the importance, the relative weight, of particular parameters of music to individual music listeners, and groups composed of those listeners who had differing levels of formal musical experience. Manipulations in various musical and auditory parameters – melodic contour, metrical accent, instrument timbre, distortion and loudness – in two short melodic phrases, were presented to two groups of participants, the formal and informal group, for melodic similarity classification in a factorial design. Individual participants employed a wide variety of weighting schemas, both in parameter hierarchy and distribution, far more than could be satisfactorily explained by the idea of parametric salience alone. Participant groups employed collective schemas that differed significantly from each other and their perceptual error rates were different both between and within-group for parts of the task where different parameters were available. The formal group exhibited an overall task processing advantage, needing less time to complete each matrix than the informal group. The greatest difference in processing between groups was in the mean excerpt listening time. Informal group participants listened for longer, particularly during secondary groupings.