Abstract
This paper examines infants’ ability to perceive various aspects of musical material that are significant in music in general and in Western European music in particular: contour, intervals, exact pitches, diatonic structure, and rhythm. For the most part, infants focus on relational aspects of melodies, synthesizing global representations from local details. They encode the contour of a melody across variations in exact pitches and intervals. They extract information about pitch direction from the smallest musically relevant pitch change in Western music, the semitone. Under certain conditions, infants detect interval changes in the context of transposed sequences, their performance showing enhancement for sequences that conform to Western musical structure. Infants have difficulty retaining exact pitches except for sets of pitches that embody important musical relations. In the temporal domain, they group the elements of auditory sequences on the basis of similarity and they extract the temporal structure of a melody across variations in tempo.
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The preparation of this manuscript was assisted by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the University of Toronto.
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Trehub, S.E. Infants’ perception of musical patterns. Perception & Psychophysics 41, 635–641 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210495
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210495