Intonation discrimination for tonal chord sequences in a priming paradigm:Effects of target predictability and musical expertise

ABSTRACT

To examine priming effects for tonal chord sequences using behavioral methods, experimenters typically employ a discrimination task that draws the participants’ attention to features of the stimulus other than those being assessed, but that may still be affected by the expectedness of the target event. And yet, despite an extensive body of evidence demonstrating tonal priming effects using several discrimination tasks, the relationships between task difficulty, musical expertise, and the expectedness of the target event are not well understood. Thus, this study predicts intonation discrimination performance for tonal chord sequences using measures related to the predictability of the terminal, target chord and the musical sophistication of the participant sample. One hundred participants (50 musicians) were presented with tonal chord sequences and asked to respond to a one-alternative forced choice (1AFC) intonation discrimination task, where out-of-tune targets were mistuned in a range from 1–100 cents sharp using a parametric adaptive staircasing procedure. Chord predictability was estimated using a probabilistic finite-context model, and musical sophistication was measured using the Goldsmith Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). As expected, discrimination thresholds varied substantially across the participant sample and were strongly negatively correlated with the Gold-MSI. What is more, moderation analyses revealed a significant interaction between intonation size and predictability, suggesting participants conflate chord intonation with unexpectedness when tuning differences are small.

KEYWORDS:

• Tonal priming
• harmonic expectations
• pitch intonation
• adaptive testing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to Kingdom and Prins (2016), the prefix in AFC tasks refers to the number of stimulus alternatives per trial M for statistical reasons associated with the estimation of performance measures in signal detection theory, but investigators also sometimes associate the prefix with other parameters like the number of response choices m, or the number of stimuli per trial N. In most priming studies, participants are told to respond only to the target chord, so M = 1.

2. The Quest adaptive staircasing procedure terminated the session after presenting the 25 out-of-tune trials. Thus, due to the randomization procedure, 14 of the 100 participants only responded to between 37–39 trials.

3. There is currently no standard method for the inclusion and decomposition of the variance from the random effects of a linear mixed effects model. Thus, measures of effect size for omnibus statistics (i.e., main effects and interactions) associated with ANOVA pedagogy are not reported here (see Tables 3–4), but we do report effect size measures for follow-up GLMMs that separately model the accuracy of the response for musicians and participants from the general group using parameter estimates (e.g., β) for the terms in the moderation analysis (e.g., Tuning × IC).