Esra Mungan

Previous studies demonstrated mere exposure effects (MEE) with musical tunes (e.g., Peretz et al., 1998; Halpern & Müllensiefen, 2008). Our goal was to investigate the effects of repeated exposures on processing fluency, recognition performance, and liking ratings for unfamiliar tonal and nontonal tunes, with type of tune being manipulated between-participants. Tunes were presented either 1, 3 or 6 times and processed either with a familiarity rating or counting long notes orienting task. We found that participants’ familiarity ratings increased across repeated exposures for both types of tunes.  Likewise, recognition performance for both unfamiliar and nontonal tunes improved with repeated exposures.  The increase in recognition sensitivity for nontonal tunes was steady across six repetitions whereas for unfamiliar tonal tunes the increase decelerated after three repetitions. Liking ratings, too, increased with repeated exposures for both types of tunes and in comparable ways.  Liking ratings were also higher for hits than misses and correlated positively with recognition confidence ratings.  Orienting tasks did not have an effect on liking or recognition. Findings are discussed with reference to the processing fluency account (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, 2004), dual process account (Mandler, 1980) and the fluency misattribution model (Bornstein & D’Agostino, 1992).

This chapter focuses on research methodologies used in studying memory for music.  A historical overview traces their development, highlighting both the variety of topics studied and the increasing experimental sophistication that paralleled methodologies used in memory research in general.  A unique challenges section focuses on such factors as the lack of meaning-based representations of musical materials, the variability in musical literacy and training of participants, the limited ways in which memory can be tested, and the largely perceptual nature of music memory.  Discussion of these unique challenges are then interweaved into a review of current behavioral and neuroscientific methodologies within the specific domains of immediate remembering, episodic and semantic memory, implicit memory, metamemory, as well as in studying individual differences.

Taylor & Pembrook (1983) proposed several factors to affect short-term memory for melodies. We reassessed their findings using a more controlled stimulus set and a 2-alternative forced choice (Experiment 1) or same/different test (Experiment 2) instead of a dictation or singing-back task. Nonmusicians listened to a total of 158 isochronous 5-tone melodies. Each melody was followed by a same-length retention interval filled with silence, nonsense syllables, a nondiatonic melody, or a diatonic melody, and a subsequent test with same-contour lures. In both experiments and across all conditions listeners showed above-chance short-term recognition performance. We replicated Taylor & Pembrook's recency effect for the 5 th note of the sequences but also found a full J-shaped serial position curve (recency>primacy>center). Secondly, listeners performed better for tone sequences that were either fully ascending or descending than those with melodic direction changes. Thirdly, listeners were better in noticing a changed note that occurred at a point of melodic direction change (e. g., Ù or Ú). In Experiment 1 but not 2, we furthermore found that this " corner note effect " was even more pronounced if that note was preceded by a " skip " (3 or more semitones) instead of a " step " (2 or less semitones) pitch interval. The latter finding was somewhat similar to Taylor and Pembrook's finding that listeners were more accurate in their reproduction of skip as opposed to step intervals when they marked a point of change in melodic direction. Fourthly, type of retention interval had a major effect on participants' performances. When tested with a 2AFC setup, the silence group performed best, when tested with a same/different setup, both the silence and nonsense syllable groups performed best. Results are discussed in reference to related STM studies using short tone sequences and Berz' (1995) working memory model for music.