one facet of tonality perception that has been fairly understudied in the years since Krumhansl and colleagues' groundbreaking work on tonality (Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982; Krumhansl & Shepard, 1979) is the music theoretical notion that the minor scale can have one of three distinct forms: natural, harmonic, or melodic. The experiment reported here fills this gap by testing if listeners form distinct mental representations of the minor tonal hierarchy based on the three forms of the minor scale. Listeners heard a musical context (a scale or a sequence of chords) consisting of one of the three minor types (natural, harmonic, or melodic) and rated a probe tone according to how well it belonged with the preceding context. Listeners' probe tone ratings corresponded well to the minor type that had been heard in the preceding context, regardless of whether the context was scalar or chordal. These data expand psychological research on the perception of tonality, and provide a convenient reference point for researchers investigating the mental representation of Western musical structure.
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June 2011
Research Article|
June 01 2011
Probing the Minor Tonal Hierarchy
Dominique T. Vuvan,
University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dominique Vuvan, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, Canada, M1C 1A4. e-mail: domi-nique.vuvan@utoronto.ca
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Jon B. Prince,
Jon B. Prince
Murdoch University, Perth, Australia
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Mark A. Schmuckler
Mark A. Schmuckler
University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Canada
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Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dominique Vuvan, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Toronto, ON, Canada, M1C 1A4. e-mail: domi-nique.vuvan@utoronto.ca
Music Perception (2011) 28 (5): 461–472.
Article history
Received:
February 24 2010
Accepted:
November 11 2010
Citation
Dominique T. Vuvan, Jon B. Prince, Mark A. Schmuckler; Probing the Minor Tonal Hierarchy. Music Perception 1 June 2011; 28 (5): 461–472. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2011.28.5.461
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