Salience of melodic tones in short-term memory: dependence on phrasing, metre, duration, register, and tonal hierarchy

The present research, developed in the field of studies on melody perception, aims to understand the features that contribute to making a single note salient during a test of short-term memory. A brief melodic fragment was presented to our subjects (musicians and non-musicians) together with a modified version with one single note varied. The subjects were invited to indicate which note had been changed. The analysis of the results revealed that the changed note was detected on the basis of its level of salience. Our first aim was to find out the features that make a note salient and hence its change detectable. Within this frame of reference we studied the salience of melodic tones in the short-term memory taking into account different aspects: location in the phrase, metre, duration, tonal hierarchy, register, and memory of previous experiences. A further aim was to test the relationships between the rules of a compositional grammar (Baroni, Dalmonte, & Jacoboni, 1999) and the actual perception of structures during the listening. The results showed that in some cases there is a convergence between composition rules and perception procedures, while in other cases important differences emerge.