T his article examines the effects of composition length, familiarity, and likeability—as well as the location of performance errors—on the process of forming performance quality ratings. Five piano works by Chopin and a twentieth-century composer were chosen to vary by length and familiarity. Three of these pieces were then manipulated to contain performance errors in the opening material, and two of those the same error at the recapitulation. Forty-two musicians provided continuous quality evaluations and final quality ratings of the performances, hearing one version of each piece. The results showed that familiarity had no effect within works of a well-known composer, but times to first and final decision were significantly extended for an unfamiliar work of an unfamiliar composer. A shorter piece led to a shorter time to first decision. An error at the beginning of a performance caused a shorter time to first decision and lower initial and final ratings, where the same error at the recapitulation did not have a significant effect on the final judgment, despite causing a temporary negative drop. These findings demonstrate how evaluators’ knowledge of a work can affect their rating process and the importance of making a strong first impression in performance.

Previous research indicates that people gain musical information from short (250 ms) segments of music. This study extended previous findings by presenting shorter (100 ms, 150 ms, and 200 ms) segments of Western popular music in rapid temporal arrays; similar to scanning through music listening options. The question remains, is there a critical feature, such as the song’s vocalist, that listeners used when processing the complex timbral arrangements of Western popular music? Participants were presented with familiar and unfamiliar music segments, four segments in succession. Each trial contained a female or a male vocalist, or was purely instrumental. Participants were asked whether they heard a vocalist (Experiment 1) or a female vocalist (Experiment 2) in one of the four music segments. Vocalist detection in Experiment 1 was well above chance for the shortest stimuli (100 ms), and performance was better in the familiar trials than the unfamiliar. When instructed in Experiment 2 to detect a female vocalist, however, participants performed better with the unfamiliar trials than the familiar trials. Together, these findings suggest that the vocalist and vocalist gender may be stored as separate features and their utility differs based on one’s familiarity with the musical stimulus.

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.

WE REPLICATED PREVIOUS FINDINGS AND DEMONSTRATED that familiarity with musical stimuli increased 'liking' or 'preference' for the stimuli. We also demonstrated that familiarity increased the intensity of emotional responses to music, but only when the stimuli were made highly familiar through en masse repetitions (Experiment 3) rather than through interspersed repetitions (Experiment 1). In addition, intensity ratings were higher when participants were asked to judge the emotion conveyed by the music than when they were asked to judge the emotion elicited by the same music (Experiments 2 and 3). Finally, positive emotions (i.e., happy and calm) were rated higher compared with negative emotions (i.e., sad and angry) for both types of ratings (i.e., conveyed or elicited). The findings suggest that familiarity plays a role in modulating a listener's emotional response to music.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THE cross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts from both familiar and unfamiliar cultures and then completed a recognition memory task for each set of examples. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their native culture and there were no performance differences based on musical expertise. In addition, Turkish participants were better at remembering Western music, a familiar but nonnative musical culture, than Chinese music. The results suggest that our cognitive schemata for musical information are culturally derived and that enculturation influences musical memory at a structural level.