This paper presents the results of an investigation into children's music listening capabilities with respect to musical pitch, focusing on the effects of types of materials presented in a short-term listening situation using the probe-note methodology. Results from a listening task administered to children of different levels of musical experience aged between 6 and 16 illustrate that children's capabilities exceeded those typically ascribed to them by music educators and psychologists. In particular, children appeared more sensitive to higher-order musical features such as interval content than to more surface features such as contour, and these sensitivities increased with age and experience. Furthermore, the distinction between musicians and non-musicians typically drawn in music- psychological research was found to be insufficient in characterising the range of children's perceptual behaviours. Evidence was also found to support the reliability of responses given in short-term listening situations.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Baddeley, A.
(1968). How does acoustic similarity influence short-term memory?Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 20, 249-264.
2.
Baddeley, A.
(1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
3.
Barsalou, L. W.
(1987). The instability of graded structure: implications for the nature of concepts.In: U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and Conceptual Development: Ecological and intellectualfactorsin categorization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-140.
4.
Bartlett, J. C.
and Dowling, W. J. (1980). Recognition of Transposed Melodies: A Key-Distance Effect in Developmental Perspective. Journal of Experimental Psychology; Human Perceptionand Performance, 6, 501-515.
5.
Bharucha, J. J.
(1984a). Event Hierarchies, Tonal Hierarchies, and Assimilation: A reply to Deutschand Dowling. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 421-425.
6.
Bharucha, J. J.
(1984b). Anchoring Effects in Music: The Resolution of Dissonance. Cognitive Psychology, 16, 485-518.
7.
Brown, H.
, Butler, D. and Jones, M. R. (1994). Musical and Temporal Influences on Key Discovery.Music Perception, 11, 371-407.
8.
Butler, D.
(1989). Describing the perception of tonality in music: A critique of the tonal hierarchytheory and a proposal for a theory of intervallic rivalry. Music Perception, 6, 219-242.
9.
Butler, D.
(1990). Response to Carol Krumhansl. Music Perception, 7, 325-338.
10.
Castellano, M. A.
, Bharucha, J. J. and Krumhansl, C. L. (1984). Tonal Hierarchies in the Music of North India. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 394-412.
11.
Cohen, A. J.
(1984). Analysis of Melodic and Interval Recognition Data: Comments on Billingsleyand Rotenberg. Psychomusicology, 4, 59-62.
12.
Cuddy, L. L.
(1994). Tone Distributions in Melody: Influences on Judgments of Salience and Similarity.Proceedings of the Third International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Liege,225-226.
13.
Cuddy, L. L.
and Badertscher, B. D. (1987). Recovery of the tonal hierarchy: Some comparisonsacross age and levels of musical experience. Perception and Psychophysics, 41, 609-620.
14.
Deutsch, D.
(1981). The processing of structured and unstructured tonal sequences. Perception and Psychophysics, 28, 381-389.
15.
Deutsch, D.
(1982). The Processing of Pitch Combinations. In: D. Deutsch (Ed.), The Psychologyof Music. London: Academic Press, 271-316.
16.
Deutsch, D.
(1984). Two Issues Concerning Tonal Hierarchies; Comment on Castellano, Bharucha,and Krumhansl. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 413-416.
17.
Dowling, W. J.
(1972). Recognition of melodic transformations: Inversion, retrograde, andretrograde inversion. Perception and Psychophysics, 12, 417-421.
18.
Dowling, W. J.
(1978). Scale and Contour: Two Components of a Theory of Memory for Melodies.Psychological Review, 85, 341-354.
19.
Dowling, W. J.
(1982). Musical scales and psychophysical scales: Their psychological reality. In:R. Falck and T. Rice (Eds.), Cross-cultural perspectives on music. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 20-28.
20.
Greene, R. L.
and Samuel, A. G. (1986). Recency and Suffix Effects in Serial Recall of Musical Stimuli. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 12, 517-524.
21.
Keil, F. C.
and Kelly, M. H. (1987). Developmental changes in category structure. In: S. Harnad(Ed.), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 491-510.
22.
Krumhansl, C. L.
(1990). Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23.
Krumihansl, C. L.
and Keil, F. C. (1982). Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music.Memory and Cognition, 10, 243-251.
24.
Krumhansl, C. L.
and Kessler, E. J. (1982). Tracing the dynamic changes in perceived tonal organizationin a spatial representation of musical keys. Psychological Review, 89, 334-368.
25.
Krumhansl, C. L.
and Shepard, R. N. (1979). Quantification of the Hierarchy of Tonal Functionswithin a Diatonic Context. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 5, 579-594.
26.
Lamont, A.
and Cross, I. (1994). Children's Cognitive Representations of Musical Pitch. Music Perception, 12, 27-55.
27.
Lamont, A.
, Bertrand, D., Cross, I. and Deliege, I. (1996). Musical Pitch Cognition in Development:Effects of Training and Education. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, McGill University, Montreal, 287-290.
28.
Lantz, M. E.
and Cuddy, L. L. (1996). The Effects of Surface Cues in the Perception of Pitch Structure:Frequency of Occurrence and Duration. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, McGill University, Montreal, 281-286.
29.
Morrongiello, B. A.
, Roes, C. L. and Donnelly, F. (1989). Children's Perception of Musical Patterns:Effects of Music Instruction. Music Perception, 6, 447-462.
30.
Murdock, B. B. Jr.
and Walker, K. D. (1969). Modality effects in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 665-676.
31.
Narmour, E.
(1990). The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures: The Implication-Realization Model. London: University of Chicago Press.
32.
Neisser, U.
(1976). Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of Cognitive Psychology.New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.
33.
Oram, N.
and Cuddy, L. L. (1995). Responsiveness of Western adults to pitch-distributional informationin melodic sequences. Psychological Research, 57, 103-118.
34.
Parncutt, R.
and Cohen, A. J. (1995). Identification of microtonal melodies: Effects of scale-stepsize, serial order, and training. Perception and Psychophysics, 57(6), 835-846.
35.
Roberts, L. A.
(1986). Modality and Suffix Effects in Memory for Melodic and Harmonic Musical Materials. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 123-157.
36.
Schellenberg, E. G.
and McKinnon, M. C. (1996). Melodic expectancy: A comparison of adultsand children. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Perception and Cognitionof Music, McGill University, Montreal, 301-304.
37.
Schwarzer, G.
(1997). Analytic and Holistic Modes in the Development of Melody Perception.Psychology of Music, 25, 35-56.
38.
Smith, J. D.
(1997). The Place of Musical Novices in Music Science. Music Perception, 14, 227-262.
39.
Speer, J. R.
and Meeks, P. U. (1985). School Children's Perception of Pitch in Music.Psychomusicology, 5, 49-55,
40.
Trehub, S. E.
, Bull, D. and Thorpe, L. A. (1984). Infants' perception of melodies: the r6le of melodiccontour. Child Development, 55, 821-830.
41.
Vygotsky, L. S.
(1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press.
42.
West, R. J.
and Fryer, R. (1990). Ratings of suitability of probe tones as tonics after random orderingof notes of the diatonic scale. Music Perception, 7, 253-258.
