Attention and memory
Fast recognition of familiar music
Bigand et al. (NM III no. 33, pp. 234-244) have designed an experiment to evaluate the minimal
length of time necessary for participants to make a familiarity judgment of excerpts from classical
music. They presented excerpts of 12 very well-known pieces and 12 relatively unkown classical
pieces to musically untrained participants. The 24 pieces were cut in a random way into fragments of
250, 350, 550, and 850 sec., linked in a scrambled way, and presented in recognition tests. The ex-
periment showed that familiarity judgments of music can be made on the basis of excerpts as short
as 250 msec.
The authors conclude that recognition of familiar music depends on a complex of local fea-
tures. They sum up these features as the ”color of sound”, comprising timbre, harmonic style, voic-
ing, and orchestration, and suggest that the color of sound provides a very fast route for accessing
musical memory traces (p. 243)
Figure 3.4. Brain areas of special importance for the control of voluntary movements.
The figure shows the surface and the inside of the left cerebral hemisphere.
M I is the Primary motor cortex, divided from S I, the Somatosensory cortex, by the Central sulcus.
Text boxes indicate the functions of the Premotor area, the Supplementary motor area, and areas 5
& 7 of the Posterior parietal cortex. Not shown are areas in the Prefrontal cortex, which are involved
in cognitive motor control (selection of goal, choice of movement strategy) (Brodal 2010:314)