Even musically trained listeners struggle to spot transposed oddball melodic phrases

Evidence

We subsequently ran a series of experiments in which we maintained a standard pitch contour, but varied the number of repetitions of the standard phrase (2 or 3), the number of tones in a phrase (2–6), the size of the deviance (1–3 semitones), and the tonality of the short melodies (Coath 2008 ). Most listeners, including those with musical education, found it very difficult to detect an oddball melodic phrase in a sequence of randomly transposed standard phrases, performing close to chance. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5263

Some years ago, in a pilot experiment we noticed that an oddball interval (e.g. a tone pair separated by 7 semitones) did not pop out as expected within a randomly transposed series of standard intervals (e.g. 3 semitones). We subsequently ran a series of experiments in which we maintained a standard pitch contour, but varied the number of repetitions of the standard phrase (2 or 3), the number of tones in a phrase (2–6), the size of the deviance (1–3 semitones), and the tonality of the short melodies (Coath 2008 ). Most listeners, including those with musical education, found it very difficult to detect an oddball melodic phrase in a sequence of randomly transposed standard phrases, performing close to chance. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5268

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: An essay angle on why interval-based melody recognition fails even for musicians — what this says about real-world melody perception.

Related

• Randomly transposing a standard phrase makes oddball melodic phrases nearly undetectable even for musicians (similarity 0.94)
• Detecting oddball patterns among transposed phrases is hard even for musicians (similarity 0.90)
• Even trained musicians have great difficulty detecting deviant melodic patterns under transposition (similarity 0.85)
• Neural detection of transposed melodies coexists with surprisingly poor explicit interval recognition (similarity 0.82)
• Listeners cannot use a repeated pattern as a template for transposed comparisons (similarity 0.82)
• Relative pitch perception is more limited than commonly assumed (similarity 0.81)
• Large melodic intervals and multiple transpositions each independently impair deviant detection. (similarity 0.80)
• Exact repetition allows direct pitch comparison whereas transposition forces interval processing (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Experimental method determines what discrepancies listeners can perceive #qualifies (0.75) — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1042