Musical pattern recognition: A comparison of listening to and studying tonal structures and tonal ambiguities.

Two experiments tested responses to short tone sequences of varying harmonic structure. In the first, listeners from three levels of previous musical training detected alterations of the sequences in a short-term recognition task. In the second, highly trained musicians rated the structure of the sequences under home-study conditions with no time constraints imposed. Both recognition and rating responses indicated a discrimination between tonal sequences and sequences where tonal rules were relaxed or violated. The raters from the second experiment were, however, more sensitive to structural variations within modulating and nondiatonic sequences and were less guided by overall pitch contour than were the liteners of the first experiment, including the musically trained listeners. The results are discussed in terms of the strategies available to detect melodic structure under different time constraints. Within the real-time constraints of a recognition test, listeners apprehend simple transformational rules. With study time in which the sequence may be analyzed through a series of hypotheses about structural properties, added symmetries become apparent.