Inference of mode in melodies

Listeners' ability to infer the mode (major vs. minor) of a piece of Wester n tonal music was examined. Twenty-four subjects, divided into two groups a ccording to their level of musical expertise, evaluated 11 musical stimuli, selected from J. S. Each's Well-Tempered Clavier. The stimuli included bot h unambiguous and ambiguous examples of the two modes, as well as one examp le of a modulation (from minor into major). The stimuli consisted of unacco mpanied melodic openings of compositions, each containing 10 tones. Stimulu s presentation and evaluation took place in nine progressively longer steps , starting with presentation of the first two tones, followed by their eval uation on a continuous scale, with 0 = "extremely minor" and 100 = "extreme ly major," and ending with evaluation of the complete stimulus. The results showed that mode inference followed the prescribed modes and tended to bec ome more definite with increasing stimulus length. Experts were generally m ore definite in their inferences than were nonexperts. Surprisingly, the te mporal structure of stimuli also appeared to affect mode inference. The deg ree of definiteness of mode judgments did not systematically differ between the two modes. It was concluded that listeners are able to infer the mode of a piece of music in the absence of explicit harmonic cues. The generaliz ability of the results with respect to music pieces of late periods in West ern music history and the impact of different musical genres on mode infere nce are discussed.