View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Bucknell University Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Faculty Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 1984 The organization of memory for familiar songs Andrea Halpern Bucknell University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_journ Part of the Behavior and Behavior Mechanisms Commons, and the Other Psychiatry and Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Halpern, Andrea. "The organization of memory for familiar songs." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (1984) : 496-512. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Copyright 1984 by the Learning, Memory, and Cognition American Psychological Association, Inc. 1984, Vol. 10, No. 3, 496-512 Organization in Memory for Familiar Songs Andrea R. Halpern Stanford University and Bucknell University The organizing principles in memory for familiar songs were investigated in two experiments. The hypothesis was that we do not store and remember each song in isolation. Rather, there exists a rich system of relationships among tunes that can be revealed through similarity rating studies and memory tasks. One initial assumption was the. division of relations among tunes into musical (tempo, rhythm, etc,) and nonmusical similarity. In the first experiment, subjects were asked: to sort 60 familiar tunes into groups according to both musical and nonmusical criteria. Clustering analyses showed clear patterns of nonmusical similarity but few instances of musical similarity. The second experiment explored the psychological validity of the nonmusical relationships revealed in Experiment 1. A speeded verification task showed that songs similar to each other are confused more often than are distantly related songs. A free-recall task showed greater clustering for closely related songs than for distantly related ones. The relationship between these studies and studies of semantic memory is discussed. Also, the contribution of musical training and individual knowledge to the organization of the memory system is considered. Humans from infancy to old age are able Most previous studies in the psychology of producers of music. Even before reaching an music have used units of analysis at or below age of 2 years old, children can produce spon- the level of single, short, often unfamiliar mel- taneous songs using distinct pitches and oc- odies. A guiding principle for the current re- casional rhythmic patterns (McKernon, 1979). search is that musical cognition exists at a Most adults whistle or sing an enormous re- higher level than the analysis of single melo- pertory of songs and fragments of larger pieces. dies. Specifically, I propose that there exists In addition, people of all ages are competent an associative memory system of all musical and enthusiastic music listeners. Simply the materials. Recently, there have been two broad ubiquity of music perception would make it approaches to studying memory organization a topic of interest to cognitive psychologists. in other domains: the clustering and semantic In addition, the fact that music lacks facile memory approaches. verbal referents presents a challenge to theo- The first approach focuses mainly on the rists accustomed to dealing with perception amount of organization subjects impose on and memory for verbal, pictorial, and prep- stimuli and the subsequent effects on memory. ositional material. Are there regularities in The. organization may be more (Bousfield, music processing comparable to those found 1953) or less (Mandler, 1967) inherent in the in these other subfields of cognitive psy- to-be-recalled items, but in either case, the chology? pattern of recall presumably reflects the sub- ject's mental organization of the items. How might the subjective organization ap- These experiments formed part of a doctoral dissertation proach be applied to a study of musical mem- submitted to Stanford University. A condensed version of ory? One could conduct an experiment asking this report was presented at the meeting of the Eastern for generation of song titles (or recall of a stim- Psychological Association, April, 1983, in Philadelphia. Thanks are due Gordon Bower, Eugenia Gerdes, and ulus list) and could measure the amount and Ian Moar for commenting on portions of this manuscript, kind of clustering that occurred. Another ex- to Edward Kessler and Jim Corter for technical assistance, perimental alternative is a sorting task, where and to Jeffrey Plunkett and Susan Chiavetta for running subjects are given song titles to place into cat- the follow-up to Experiment 2. Requests for reprints should be sent to Andrea R. Hal- egories to reveal mental organization. The for- pern, Department of Psychology, Bucknell University, mer technique was used in Experiment 2 and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837. the latter in Experiment 1. 496 MEMORY FOR FAMILIAR SONGS 497 Another approach to memory organization suppose that their search has proceeded is derived from computer simulations of through an organized memory system. memory. These semantic memory models offer Additional evidence for extramusical rela- a more complete statement about the struc- tions was observed in a pilot procedure for tures and processes involved in a memory sys- the current experiments. As a step toward as- tem. For instance, when Quillian (1969) sembling stimulus materials for this study, a started to simulate a Teachable Language sample of students was asked to list tunes they Comprehender (TLC), he was forced to decide thought others would know. No specific recall how the system's knowledge would be repre- instructions were given, yet groups of songs, sented and how the system would go about such as Beatles tunes, hymns, or children's retrieving information from the data base. As songs, were clustered together in the output. is now well known, Quillian chose a hierar- Additional evidence for musical relations chical representation where objects and their comes from singing errors. Uncertain singers properties were combined into more general produce singing errors with definite patterns. supersets at each level of the hierarchy (for Rarely does a random collection of pitches instance,,canary —> bird —» animal). The sys- emerge in place of the chosen tune. Instead, tem was designed to answer questions of the the pattern resembles the correct tune at least type: Does object x possess property fl The in contour (the up or down direction of suc- latencies to answer such questions provided a cessive pitches). McKernon (1979) reported test of the representational structure. that young children can initially produce the Following this approach, Experiment 2 used right pace, contour, and phrase boundaries of a question-answering technique with musical a song; later they produce the correct pitches materials. The goal was to find out whether a and rhythm. These nonrandom errors may oc- "semantic memory" of tunes with different cur because isolated tunes are stored in a sche- degrees of relatedness could be reflected in on- matic form. Because generalized representa- line processing. This is a step toward describing tions obscure differences among individual the way in which our whole vocabulary of items, each schematic form may stand for tunes is interrelated in the spirit of the above more than one melody. Then these schemata memory models. But what does semantic dis- may in turn be related in the memory system. tance mean for musical memory? How can we characterize these schemata? At least two kinds of "semantic" associations Much of the research in the psychology of may operate in musical memory. One class I music investigates how individual melodies are call musical relations, that is, relations among represented in memory. These studies of mel- patterns of a purely musical nature. Musical ody perception form the basis of hypotheses relations refer to such features as tonality, con- about the musical relations that may exist tour, tempo, and rhythm. The other class is among the melodies. Some aspects of a melody extramusical relations. These relations refer that are important in its representation may to the category of the tune (patriotic song, be the intervals between contiguous or non- commercial jingle, score from a musical), age contiguous pairs of notes, the contour (pattern of acquisition, episodic connections (songs of ups and downs of successive notes), the har- heard at a particular concert), or the dramatic monic relation of each note to the tune's tonal value of a piece. (Of course, these classes of center, and rhythm. relations may be correlated.) The importance of individual interval size Evidence for use of both kinds of relations in melody recognition was shown by Dowling can be seen anecdotally and dramatically in and Bartlett (1981). They found that interval the popular television game show Name That information was especially important in long- Time. Contestants, who know an exceptional term memory for real music. In musical number of songs, are given an extramusical memory retrieval, exact interval knowledge clue, such as a hint about the composer, and could prove crucial in a fast search of long- then