Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 98, Issue 1, November 2005, Pages 1-11
Cognition

Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2004.09.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative pitch processors. Infants familiarized with a melody for 7 days preferred, on the eighth day, to listen to a novel melody in comparison to the familiarized one, regardless of whether the melodies at test were presented at the same pitch as during familiarization or transposed up or down by a perfect fifth (7/12th of an octave) or a tritone (1/2 octave). On the other hand, infants showed no preference for a transposed over original-pitch version of the familiarized melody, indicating that either they did not remember the absolute pitch, or it was not as salient to them as the relative pitch.

Section snippets

Participants

Thirty-two healthy infants between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 months (13 female, 19 male; mean=6.02 months, SD=.22) completed the required familiarization and testing. Another nine infants were excluded due to parents' failure to follow familiarization instructions (3) or failure to complete testing because of fussing (6). All infants were full term and healthy, with no familial history of hearing impairment.

Stimuli and materials

The two old English folk songs used in Trainor et al. (2004), “Country Lass” and “Painful Plough,”

Participants

Thirty-two healthy infants between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 months of age (15 female, 17 male; mean=6.1 months, SD=.28) completed the testing. Another 12 infants were excluded due to parents' failure to follow familiarization instructions (2) or failure to complete testing because of fussing (10). The data from one of the 32 infants completing the testing was excluded from the analysis because the difference between listening time to novel and familiar was more than three standard deviations from the

General discussion

The results of this study suggest that by 6 months of age infants, like adults, store melodic information primarily according to a relative and not an absolute pitch code in long-term memory. After a delay of 1 day, infants at 6 months recognized a familiar melody although it was presented at a new pitch, and recognition was as good for transpositions to related as to unrelated keys. The possibility that infants also remember the absolute pitch of a familiar melody cannot be ruled out, but the

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to LJT and a student scholarship to JP. We thank Joanne Leuzzi and Charlene Kroeze for assistance in testing the infants and Terri Lewis for comments on an earlier draft.

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