Music Listening, Music Therapy, Phenomenology and Neuroscience

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

31. Schulkind

(216

-224)

Is memory for music special?

Cat. 14: Memory

32. 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