#SERIAL FOR MELODICS SERIAL#

#SERIAL FOR MELODICS SERIAL#

Performance at all serial positions was generally best for tones initiating long sound-filled intervals and was also better at a particular serial position when pitch-level accenting took the form of a pitch contour inflection instead of a unidirectional pitch skip. Musicians performed better than non musicians on all patterns however, an account of performance in terms of “rhythmic noncousonance” generated by the above three categories predicted 63% and 42% of the variance in musicians’ and nonmusicians’ performance, respectively.

Patterns in the latter two classes sound syncopated, and they generally resulted in poorer pitch-discrimination performance. Rhythmically dissonant patterns had temporal accenting and pitch-level accenting at different metrical rates. Rhythmically out-of-phase consonant patterns had temporal accenting and pitch-level accenting that occurred regularly at the same metrical rate, but the two were never in phase. Rhythmically, consonant patterns had temporal accenting that was always metrically in phase with pitch-level accenting and promoted the best performance. In this study there were three classes of temporal patterns. A literature review suggested that temporal accent occurs for tones initiating a lengthened temporal interval and for tones initiating a group of three or more intervals pitch-level accent is a product of pitch skips on the order of 4 semitones or of the change of direction of the pitch contour. In a complete factorial design, there were 84 standard melodies (4 pitch patterns × 21 rhythms), each of which was paired with 10 octave-raised comparisons 5 comparisons were identical to the standard in chroma and 5 had a single changed chroma. Musicians and nonmusicians rated the similarity of pairs of 9-note melodies that could differ in the pitch chroma of a single note at any of five serial positions. This study was designed to explore the kinds of temporal patterning that foster pitch-difference discrimination.

Serial for melodics