The effect of pitch, tempo and proportional pitch and tempo manipulation on memory of familiar musical excerpts

The aim of the study was to investigate participants' ability to identify the correct pitch and tempo of musical events from long-term memory. Seventy two participants listened to a series of comparison pairs of excerpts from well known television themes. Each comparison pair included the original excerpt and a variant of that same excerpt that had the pitch, tempo or pitch and tempo manipulated. It was hypothesised that variant excerpts whose pitch and tempo had been varied proportionally are more difficult to differentiate from the original than variant excerpts that have only their pitch or tempo manipulated. It was also hypothesised that participants reporting more than three years musical training (musicians) are more able to identify the original pitch and tempo than participants not reporting musical training (nonmusicians). Results suggest that for the differentiation of individual manipulations of pitch or tempo there is no significant difference between musicians and nonmusicians. However, identification of the original excerpt was poorer for nonmusicians when the variant excerpt included the proportional manipulation of both pitch and tempo. These findings suggest that musicians use different memorisation strategies for musical information than those not reporting musical training and also suggests the perception of ratio relationship between the frequencies of tonal and infratonal auditory events.