Learning unfamiliar pitch intervals: A novel paradigm for demonstrating the learning of statistical associations between musical pitches.

ABSTRACT: While mastering a musical instrument takes years, becoming familiar with a new music system requires less time and skills. In this study, we examine whether musically untrained Western listeners can incidentally learn an unfamiliar, microtonal musical scale from simply engaging in a timbre discrimination task. The experiment is comprised of an Exposure and a Test phase. During Exposure, 21 non-musicians were instructed to detect a timbre shift (TS) within short microtonal melodies, and we hypothesised that they would incidentally learn about the pitch interval structure of the microtonal scale from attending to the melodies during the task. In a follow-up Test phase, the tone before the TS was either a member (congruent) or a non-member (incongruent) of the scale. Based on our statistical

SUBMITTER: Leung Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6117015 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature