Emergence of thematic concepts in repeated listening to music

Abstract A repeated listening procedure was designed to monitor changes in listener's appreciation of thematic categories in musical compositions. Subjects listened to a recorded musical composition. Passages selected from the composition were then played in pairs, and listeners rated their similarity. The similarity data were submitted to INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling procedure, which located the passages in an n-dimensional space. This procedure was repeated in three separate sessions, so that changes in the perceived musical structure could be observed. In Study 1, subjects heard Liszt's Sonata in b, and target passages were Theme A, Theme B, and three variations of each theme. While extrathematic dimensions dominated early acquaintance, a theme dimension emerged in the second and third sessions. Musicians gave higher weight to the theme dimension than did nonmusicians, and theme was the only dimension for experts on this sonata. Musicians were also more accurate in a final classification test, but only after repeated listening. The effect of repeated exposure on transfer to new theme exemplars was considered in Study 2. It is hoped this work will foster more naturalistic approaches to musical cognition.

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