The Effect of Titles on the Memory for Music

The present paper examines the effect of the titles which were given as an encoding cue for musical passages.These titles were different in their imagery value and validity.There were four title conditions, namely, concreteadequate, concrete-inadequate, abstract, and no-title.The subjects were asked to make a mental image referring to the title, and to take a recognition test later.As a result, the higher imagery value titles resulted in a higher recognition performance, and the higher validity titles also resulted in a higher recognition performance.There was no difference in performance between the title and no-title conditions.These results were discussed in relation to the dual-coding hypothesis, the idea of conflict, and the study of program music.This report is concerned with the meaningful interpretation of musical passages and its influence on a subsequent recognition test.It is important to study the relations between music and language.Previous research studies include the following.Farnsworth (1958) classified the verbal characteristics of music into three aspects: "desire for communication", "grammar", and "meaning".The "desire for communication" seems to present no problems because the composers and players try to make the audience understand what they want to express.The "grammar" is also unproblematic because there are certain rules concerning how to compose.But as for the "meaning", although emotional reactions to music may be similar between individuals, the images, thoughts, and ideas which listeners associate with a particular passage are generally very different (Downey, 1897).Meyer (1967) has divided the meaning of music into two classes: "embodied meaning" and "designative meaning".The "embodied meaning" is the melodic properties of passages, for example, the pitch, harmony or rhythm of the music.The "designative meaning" is the images and ideas that the passage may evoke.Recent investigations (Dowling, 1973, Dowling & Fujitani, 1971, House, 1977, Dowling & Hollomble, 1977) have supported the idea that the "embodied meaning" of a musical passage affects memory for the music.In these studies, they made distorted melodies by changing the pitch or harmony of familiar melodies, and examined whether the subjects could recognize them or not.As for the "designative meaning", it is important to consider the relation between language and music further.For example, there is the problem of program music.The problem of these studies is how a different effect would be brought about if the music had a title when the audience is listening.From these studies, it is reported that listeners can get