The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music

Thirteen ways of hearing a melody

One way to appreciate the cognitive richness of melody perception is to enumerate the

different things a listener hears during melodic processing. The following list is based on

perception of a simple melody by a listener familiar with Western European tonal music.

The list is not exhaustive, but merely touches on some of the more obvious features of

melodic perception. Readers who wish to delve deeper into the structure of melody may

consult Leonard Meyer’s Explaining Music^4 and Eugene Narmour’s two volumes on the

analysis and cognition of melodies.5,6

Instrument identity

An immediate and salient aspect of melody perception is recognition of the instrument

producing the tones (e.g. piano vs violin). Instrument recognition takes place very rapidly

(instruments can often be recognized from single tones), and relies heavily on timbre or

‘sound quality’, which is a complex feature relying on the spectral and temporal shape of

sound.^7

Grouping

Grouping refers to the segmentation of a melody into units larger than single tones.^8

This can be illustrated with K0016, which consists of 33 separate tones. These tones define

33 minimal ‘pitch-time units’, each defined by a particular pitch and duration. In listening

to this melody, there is a clear sense of larger pitch-time units between the levels of the indi-

vidual pitches and the entire melody. For example, the melody is perceived as divided into

phrases, schematically marked in Figure 21.2. The boundaries of the first two phrases are

326     

Figure 21.1 A children’s melody from the ESAC database (K0016). The melody has been transposed to the key
of C. (A) Western music notation. (B) Piano roll notation, with each tone’s fundamental frequency (in semitones
from C4 or 261.63 Hz) plotted as a function of time. A semitone is a ratio of ~1.06 in fundamental frequency, and
corresponds to the distance between a neighbouring white and black piano key. K0016 ranges over 12 semitones
(one octave, a doubling in fundamental frequency), that is,5 semitones below C4 to 7 semitones above it.

A

B

Semitones re C4

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