Timbre and Memory

1
Timbre and Memory

• An experiment for the musical mind
• Emily Yang Yu
• Music 151, 2008

2
Introduction

• Effect of timbre on music memory!
• 1. Would a musician who plays a specific
  instrument be able to memorize a short musical
  excerpt better if the excerpt is played in
  his/her instrument?
• 2. A similar, but slightly different question
  when the music sample is played by a certain
  instrument, does the instrumentalist (a musician
  who plays the instrument) memorize the short
  musical excerpt better than non-instrumentalist
  (a musician who was trained in a different
  instrument)1.
• 3. When the excerpt is played by the instrument
  of the musicians expertise, how do musicians
  (who are entrained to the instruments sound)
  compare to of non-musicians in musical memory.
• 1 Question 1 takes a musician, and asks whether
  that musician, on an individual level, performs
  better when the excerpt is played by his or her
  instrument. Question 2, takes a music sample, and
  asks whether the instrumentalist would perform
  better than the non-instrumentalists. The two
  questions are essentially the same, but just two
  different ways of looking at it.

3
Background

• While fundamental frequency and repetition
  frequency had negligible effects on timbre
  memory, interference with timbre memory increased
  with the spectral similarity of the interpolated
  tones to the standard tone.
• Pitch is processed independently of timbre in
  auditory short term memory.
• The tendency to perceive pitch in relation to
  other context pitches was strong and unaffected
  by whether timbre was constant or varying. In
  contrast, the relative perception of timbre was
  weak and was found only when pitch was constant.
• Timbre is perceived more in absolute than in
  relative terms.
• Found that timbre changes differentially affected
  neither musicans nor nonmusicians memory for
  melodies.
• in no case were the interactions of age and
  experience on the memory or perceptual speed
  variables significant
• both the left and right hemispheres are involved
  in timbre processing, although the processing is
  assymetrical
• Musical training, in addition to enhancing the
  acquisition of specific knowledge about diatonic
  scalevstructure, may also more generally
  facilitate the encoding of and memory for musical
  material

4
Hypothesis

• That timbre will not have a significant effect on
  timbre
• Pitch and timbre are processed independently
• Musician should perform better than
  non-musicians.
• Musical training, in addition to enhancing the
  acquisition of specific knowledge about diatonic
  scale structure, may also more generally
  facilitate the encoding of and memory for musical
  material

5
Experimental Design

• Divided into 9 segments.
• Each segment includes
• A music sample played automatically and only
  once
• The distracter
• Pink noise background
• 1-2 text questions about the participants music
  background. Some are multiple choice/yes and no.
  Some are free response.
• Answer to the music sample
• 3 choices are given. The participant is the
  person who selects to play each answer choices.

6
Experimental Design

• Of the 9 samples played
• There are 3 different difficulty levels
• 4, 6, and 8 notes in length
• There are 3 different timbres
• Viola, piano and clarinet
• Music samples/answers are generated randomly.
• Thus avoiding typical musical gestures.
• Melodies are kept in the same range. (c4-c5)
• The survey takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.
  

7
Improvements to the design

• I originally wanted to add two more timbres
• Samples can be made of a mix of the 3 timbres.
  Answer choices would have the same sequence of
  timbre.
• Completely synthesized timbre not an
  instrumental sound. This would have been a great
  tool for comparison between nonmusicians and
  musicians.

8
Results
9
Results
10
Results
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Results
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What I could have done better...

• Too Easy this could account of the very small
  amount of performance variation between all
  groups
• Make the wrong answer choices more similar to the
  correct one!
• The distracter
• Some people said that it took longer to answer
  the free response questions, thus, the
  distraction time amongst the segments was not
  uniform.
• The website
• There were a lot of things that could have
  limited people from cheating, but the technology
  didnt really allow them.
• The player
• Unfortunately, I was unable to take out the time
  component on the player for Linux computer users.
  People could have cheated that way.
• The music samples
• The website I used to obtained the music samples
  didnt have very good players. Some of them were
  very out of tune.
• Processing them in Audacity made some of the
  sounds become unnatural/sounds synthesized.
• The time between each notes were very exact. So
  theres a small rhythmic component to the test.