RECOGNITION OF MUSIC IN LONG-TERM-MEMORY - ARE MELODIC AND TEMPORAL PATTERNS EQUAL PARTNERS

The notion that the melody (i.e., pitch structure) of familiar music i s more recognizable than its accompanying rhythm (i.e., temporal struc ture) was examined with the Same set of nameable musical excerpts in t hree experiments. In Experiment 1, the excerpts were modified so as to keep either their original pitch variations, whereas durations were s et to isochrony (melodic condition) or their original temporal pattern while played on a single constant pitch (rhythmic condition). The sub jects, who were selected without regard to musical training, were foun d to name more tunes and to rate their feeling of knowing the musical excerpts far higher in the melodic condition than in the rhythmic cond ition. These results were replicated in Experiment 2, wherein the melo dic and rhythmic patterns of the musical excerpts were interchanged to create chimeric mismatched tunes. The difference in saliency of the m elodic pattern and the rhythmic pattern also emerged with a music-titl e-verification task in Experiment 3, hence discarding response selecti on as the main source of the discrepancy. The lesser effectiveness of rhythmic structure appears to be related to its lesser encoding distin ctiveness relative to melodic structure. In general, rhythm was found to be a poor cue for the musical representations that are stored in lo ng-term memory. Nevertheless, in all three experiments, the most effec tive cue for music identification involved the proper combination of p itches and durations. Therefore, the optimal code of access to long-te rm memory for music resides in a combination of rhythm and melody, of which the latter would be the most informative.