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Musicality michael3/6/2023 ![]() ![]() Both batteries involve listening to short melodies and noticing musical deviations, or deciding whether two melodies are the same or different by a single note shift of 3–7 semitones that changes the scale (or key), intervals, or contour of the melody. In the course of those evaluations, participants completed both the Brief Assessment of Music Perception 25 (BAMP and the Montreal Battery for Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) 32. Status as amusic or control was established prior to the study using the Montreal Protocol for Identification of Amusia 31. Participants were not told that the study involved singing unless they asked for more information, and no one with amusia declined to participate except those who had relocated. Details about socio-cultural background were not collected, but all participants were residents of Quebec, Canada. In all cases, however, a musical context guides the behavioral response.Įighteen adults with congenital amusia ( M = 57.0, SD = 20.8 years 12 female, 6 male), and 15 nonmusician controls ( M = 58.6, SD = 21.3 years 10 female, 5 male) were recruited from a database of individuals who participated in previous research. Production paradigms ( ‘sing the next note’) are less common and tend to be restricted to musically experienced participants 23. ![]() Variations of these methods reveal implicit tonal knowledge among children as young as 4–5 years old, nonmusicians, and even amusic individuals who have little or no awareness of music rules or theory 18, 19, 20, 21, 22. An irrelevant change on the target event, such as a change of timbre, will be more rapidly detected if the chord conforms to tonal expectations 17. Another widely used method consists of presenting a priming context of notes or chords that generate tonal expectancies for the final target event. In Western listeners, the ratings typically follow a profile where the tonic and closely related tones (the fifth and third degrees) are preferred over other scale and out-of-scale tones. ![]() Listeners rate whether the final tone fits the preceding context 16. For example, the classic probe tone technique consists of presenting a tonal sequence of pitches ending on a variable probe tone. Prior behavioral studies of inner tonal knowledge have used paradigms that induce a sense of tonality 15. We define tonality as adherence to a scale, specifically the major and minor scales of Western tonal music, which are most likely to be culturally familiar to our Canadian participants, as well as the tendency to return to the tonic at the end of a melody. Tonal hierarchical organization of pitch is central because it facilitates perception, memory, and performance by creating expectancies 13, 14. The organizational principle of tonality is largely absent in speech 9, 10, yet the presence of discrete pitches, often forming nonequidistant scales, is ‘statistically universal’ across musical systems 11, even as scales differ across societies 12. These tonal principles allow, for example, any individual to detect an out-of-scale note in the musical surface. Nonscale tones are the least stable and often sound “sour”. Among the other scale tones, there is a hierarchy of importance or stability 8. In such music, scale tones are organized around a central tone, sometimes called the tonic, which usually starts and ends a musical piece. Most tonal music uses 4–7 focal pitches, forming a scale. Here, we examine whether sung improvisations demonstrate what has been proposed as one of the fundamental components of musicality: tonal organization of pitch 6, 7. Musicality can be defined as, “a natural, spontaneously developing set of traits based on and constrained by our cognitive abilities and their underlying biology” 5. The findings are a proof of concept that improvisation can serve as a novel, even enjoyable method for systematically measuring hidden aspects of musicality across the spectrum of musical ability. The results show signatures of tonality in both nonmusicians and individuals with congenital amusia, who have notorious difficulty performing musical tasks that require explicit responses and memory. To assess the extent to which each improvisation reflects tonality, which has been proposed to be a core organizational principle of musicality and which is present within most music traditions, we developed a new algorithm that compares a sung excerpt to a probability density function representing the tonal hierarchy of Western music. Each sang 28 long improvisations as a response to a verbal prompt or a continuation of a melodic stem. Here, we exploit this natural inclination to probe implicit musical knowledge in 33 untrained and poor singers (amusia). Humans spontaneously invent songs from an early age. ![]()
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