In a prior study (Temperley & Tan, 2013), participants rated the “happiness” of melodies in different diatonic modes. A strong pattern was found, with happiness decreasing as scale steps were lowered. We wondered: Does this pattern reflect the familiarity of diatonic modes? The current study examines familiarity directly. In the experiments reported here, college students without formal music training heard a series of melodies, each with a three-measure beginning (“context”) in a diatonic mode and a one-measure ending that was either in the context mode or in a mode that differed from the context by one scale degree. Melodies were constructed using four pairs of modes with the same tonic: Lydian/Ionian, Ionian/Mixolydian, Dorian/Aeolian, and Aeolian/Phrygian. Participants rated how well the ending “fit” the context. Two questions were of interest: (1) Do listeners give higher ratings to some modes (as endings) overall? (2) Do listeners give a higher rating to the ending if its mode matches that of the context? The results show a strong main effect of ending, with Ionian (major) and Aeolian (natural minor) as the most familiar (highly rated) modes. This aligns well with corpus data representing the frequency of different modes in popular music. There was also a significant interaction between ending and context, whereby listeners rated an ending higher if its mode matched the context. Our findings suggest that (1) our earlier “happiness” results cannot be attributed to familiarity alone, and (2) listeners without formal knowledge of diatonic modes are able to internalize diatonic modal frameworks.
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February 2017
Research Article|
February 01 2017
Perception and Familiarity of Diatonic Modes
Daphne Tan,
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
Daphne Tan, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, 1201 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405. E-mail: datan@indiana.edu
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David Temperley
David Temperley
Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester
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Daphne Tan, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, 1201 East Third Street, Bloomington, IN 47405. E-mail: datan@indiana.edu
Music Perception (2017) 34 (3): 352–365.
Article history
Received:
September 26 2015
Accepted:
June 27 2016
Citation
Daphne Tan, David Temperley; Perception and Familiarity of Diatonic Modes. Music Perception 1 February 2017; 34 (3): 352–365. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2017.34.3.352
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