Psychology of Music

Support for the hypothesis that there is a critical period in the development of absolute pitch is largely indirect, consisting of retrospective, biographical analyses. A direct demonstration that the same techniques for acquiring absolute pitch are more effective with immature compared to mature individuals is apparently lacking from the literature. To address this, an experiment comparing A4 reference tone acquisition of pre-school (4-5 years) and adolescent (13-15 years) participants was carried out. At the end of six weeks of training, the pre-school group (N = 12) showed significant improvements in reference tone identification and reproduction, compared both with themselves and with the adolescent group (N = 12). A synthesis of both critical period and unlearning hypotheses is proposed as an integrative framework for the absolute pitch literature.

Student subjects completed an updated version of Litle and Zuckerman's Music Preference Scale, a questionnaire measuring musical preference. They also completed the NEO Personality Inventory (Revised), a measure of the Five-Factor Model of personality. Factor analysis identified three patterns of preference associated with liking for most types of Rock Music, general Breadth of Musical Preference, and liking for Popular Music (such as easy listening). The three factors were employed as dependent variables in canonical correlations to examine relationships with personality. As predicted, most relationships with music preference involved the personality measures extraversion and openness. Extraverts obtained high scores on the Popular Music factor. Open individuals liked a wide range of music types. It was also found that females liked popular music styles more than did males. Particular personality "facets" were examined, as were the effects of musical training and interest. The research extends previous investigations relating preference and personality.

The timing of arpeggiated chords involving both hands sequentially was measured in performances of Edvard Grieg's Erotik, op. 43, No. 5, by ten graduate student pianists (who played the piece three times after brief study) and by eight commercially recorded ("expert") pianists. Arpeggio durations depended more on the preceding note value and position in the phrase than on the number of notes. The student pianists frequently overlapped the two hands, contrary to the notation. Those student arpeggios which were executed correctly frequently showed lengthening of the final and, less often, of the initial interonset interval. There were consistent individual differences in the students' timing patterns. The expert pianists showed even larger individual differences and few commonalities. The origins of these differences and their perceptual and aesthetic implications remain to be investigated.

Adults (N = 96) with little or no training in music heard one of four possible MIDI versions of each of four musical excerpts. The four versions of each excerpt included one with unvarying tempo and dynamics, one with variations in tempo only, one with variations in dynamics only, and one with variations in tempo and dynamics. Participants rated each excerpt on a 7-point scale for likeability and emotional expressiveness. Variations in dynamics resulted in higher ratings on both measures but variations in tempo had no such effect. In general, women rated the musical excerpts as more emotionally expressive and more likeable than did men. Finally, musical preferences were highly correlated with ratings of emotional expressiveness.

A connectionist model of an atonal discrimination task is reported which illustrates the fundamental principles of artificial neural networks and embodies the assumptions of pattern recognition theory. Musical sequences are defined as patterns consisting of local and global features and it is proposed that recognition of music is achieved by way of processes which extract and differentially weight such features. Musical training serves to refine the feature extraction and weighting processes. As hypothesised, musically trained and untrained listeners were able to discriminate between atonal sequences on the basis of rhythmic and intervallic features although there was no effect of musical training on accuracy and response time measures. Neural network and human data were compared and testable predictions generated by the mechanistic model are provided. The potential contribution of connectionist models to developmental and environmental aspects of music perception and cognition is discussed.

An experimental training study was conducted to investigate children's difficulties with language relating to musical pitch. Participanits were tested on Spatial and Pitch tests before and after a training intervention. One group received training which reinforced the spatial metaphor of pitch, another received training in the same vocabulary but without spatial reinforcement, and a control group received no training. Results confirmed that children perform better on spatial tests than on pitch tests using the same terms, and improvements on the Pitch test were obtained at post-test. However, since gains were obtained in each group, the benefits of specific training require future research