Perception and Cognition in Music: Musically Trained and Untrained Adults Compared to Sixth-Grade and Eighth-Grade Children

We investigated different levels of age and musical training in relation to subjects' melodic perception in music by testing their ability to perceive a target melody when extremely similar melodies are interpolated between this original melody and its reoccurrence. Participants were sixth graders, eighth graders, young adults, and trained musicians who listened to 16 original melodies, each of which was followed by 8 extremely similar melodies. Two different experiments (A and B) tested different arrangements of mode and meter interpolations. We also asked the adult musicians to specify cognitive strategies for accomplishing the task. Results demonstrated greater accuracy among experienced musicians, yet results show that even young students are capable of remembering and discriminating similar melodies with high accuracy. Written analyses of strategies used by musicians indicated they considered the task extremely difficult and that their past musical training helped with the task; they also indicated that children could not do this task, which was not the case.