TIMBRE RELIANCE IN NONMUSICIANS AND MUSICIANS MEMORY FOR MELODIES

This paper reports two experiments that test Wolpert's' (1990) claim t hat musicians and nonmusicians differ in their memory for melodies bec ause nonmusicians' memory performance reflects a greater use of the ti mbre dimension to make recognition decisions. In both experiments, lis teners were asked to identify which of two test melodies, a target and a distracter, was heard previously. On one half of the trials, the ta rget melody was in the same timbre as the original, and the distracter was in a different timbre. For the other half of the trials, the dist racter melody was in the same timbre as the original, and the target m elody was in a different timbre. In her earlier study, Wolpert found t hat nonmusicians' memory for melodies was affected by timbre changes, whereas musicians' memory was not. In the present experiments, we cont rolled for instruction clarity and brought listener performance down f rom near perfect. As a result, it was found that timbre changes differ entially affected neither musicians' nor nonmusicians' memory for melo dies.