MUSICAL SCHEMATA IN REAL-TIME LISTENING TO A PIECE OF MUSIC

A series of experiments investigated cognitive processes involved in l istening to a piece of music, focusing in particular on the abstractio n of surface features (here referred to as cues). Subjects listened to an unfamiliar piece in a familiar musical idiom, and their sensitivit ies to aspects of the just-heard piece were used to elucidate the natu re of their representations of the piece in recent memory. The study a lso sought to assess the capacities of subjects to use any declarative knowledge of aspects of tonal structure that they possessed in organi zing musical material. Three experiments made use of different procedu res to address these issues, using either a single short tonal piece-S chubert's Valse sentimentale, D. 779, op. 50, no. 6-or a variant of th is. The first two experiments used nonmusician subjects and examined ( 1) the cues abstracted in listening to the piece and (2) subjects' abi lity to identify the temporal location of segments of the piece after listening. The third experiment explored the constructional abilities of musician and nonmusician subjects, requiring them to create a coher ent piece by ordering the segments that made up the original piece. Th e results of these experiments indicated that although the abilities o f musicians differed from those of nonmusicians, both groups of subjec ts exhibited a weaker sensitivity to features of musical structure tha n to cues abstracted from the musical surface.