Appendix 3.03 Survey of The Neurosciences
and Music III Conference 2008
Disorders and Plasticity
Part IV. Musical Memory: Music is Memory
(31
-42)
Title, Category
Aim
Mus. Material, Cultural Ref.
Technology & Procedure
Main focus of interest
Conclusion
- Schulkind
(216
-224)
Is memory for music special?
Cat. 14: Memory
- Thiessen & Safran
(225
-233)
Melody and lyric learning by infants
Cat. 9: Chi
ld development
Cat. 14: Memory *33. Bigand et al.
(234
-244)
Local features and familiarity judgments in music
Cat. 13: Recognition
Cat. 14: Memory
To address two questions:
1)
Do cultural beliefs about
the
mnemonic power of music
stand up to em
pirical test?
2) Can theories designed to explain memory for non
musical stimuli be applied fo musical stimuli?
To assess whether infants show evidence of reciprocal facilitation between melody and lyrics when learning simple songs
Musically untraine
d
participants were asked to differentiate famous from unknown musical excerpts that were presented in normal or scrambled ways
Recorded music:
Different kind
s of music in
different studies, e.g.
1) Popular music 1935
-1994.
2) Classical or popular
music
used as background for memory tests
CR: Western, Western popular
Two strings of 5 digit names:
9-7-3-1-
5 and 6-2-8-0-4
a) spoken in an adult register
b) each of the
strings was
sung using different melodies, the second one more tonal
CR: Western
Recorded music:
12 well
-known and 12
relatively unknown pieces of classical music, duration 11
26 sec, were cut in a random way into fragments of 250, 350, 550, and 850 msec, and linked in a scrambled way.
24 spoken texts scrambled in a similar way CR: W
estern
Review of the literature on memory for music: 1) Memory
for popular music across the life span
2) Memory for music
in dementia 3) Music as a mnemonic device
4) Theoretical approaches to evaluating whether memory for music is special
40 infants, 6-
8 months. Half in
the spoken condition, half in the sung condition. Headturn Preference Procedure includ
ing familiarization period a
nd
test period. Two experiments
49 musically untrained under
graduate students (France)
in
two groups. 1) ”Bottom
-up”
started by listening to all the scrambled pieces that had 250 ms fragments, then 350, 550, 850, and whole excerpt.
2) ”Top
-down”: Reverse order
To discuss the reliability of cultural beliefs
about musical
memory
, and the reliability of
various kinds
of studies
Do infants, like adults, capitalize on complexity, or instead do they benefit from simplified input?
To evaluate the minimal length of time necessary for participants to make a familiarity judgment.
And to
assess the contributions of local and global features to object identification.
Discussion of identification of words, objects, faces, and music
Although the question of whether memory for music is special remains open, the unique structure of musical stimuli strongly suggests that mem
ory for music is indeed
special Infants learned lyrics more easily when they were paired with a melody than when they were presented alone. Similarly, they learned melodies more easily when paired with lyrics
Familiarity judgments for both music and
spoken
texts can be made on the basis of excerpts as short as 250 msec
. Suggestion:
The color of sound, i.e. timbre, harmonic style, voicing, and orchestra
tion
provides a very fast route for accessing musical memory traces