Open AccessParsing and memorizing tonal and modal melodies 1
Author(s) -
OURA YOKO,
HATANO GIYOO
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
japanese psychological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.392
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-5884
pISSN - 0021-5368
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-5584.2004.00263.x
Subject(s) - melody , memorization , parsing , computer science , speech recognition , modal , style (visual arts) , linguistics , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , cognitive psychology , musical , art , literature , philosophy , chemistry , polymer chemistry
The role that style‐specific (form‐ and syntactic rules‐based) parsing strategies play in melodic memory was investigated. Two melodies of different styles, a tonal melody in the style of Western tonal music and a modal (Japanese traditional) melody, were used as materials. The results showed that: (i) musically experienced students who had years of experience playing pieces of Western tonal piano music could parse the tonal melody promptly and appropriately, but could not achieve stable parsing for the modal melody; (ii) inexperienced students took a little longer to segment the tonal melody, but could memorize the tonal melody easily when parsing preceded the memorizing task; however, (iii) the inexperienced students could not parse the modal melody stably, and their recall performance was not enhanced even when their parsing was led to be stable and appropriate by demonstrating successive phrases in the melody. These results indicate that stable parsing is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for prompt melodic memory.