Long‐term memory for music: infants remember tempo and timbre Journal Articles

abstract

• Abstract We show that infants’ long‐term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo‐ and timbre‐specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants preferred to listen to a novel folk song, indicating that they remembered the familiarized melody. However, if the tempo (25% faster or slower) or instrument timbre (harp vs. piano) of the familiarized melody was changed at test, infants showed no preference, indicating that they remembered the specific tempo and timbre of the melodies. The results are consistent with an exemplar‐based model of memory in infancy rather than one in which structural features are extracted and performance features forgotten.

authors

• Trainor, Laurel
• Wu, Luann
• Tsang, Christine D

status

• published 

publication date

• June 2004

has subject area

• 1701 Psychology (FoR)
• 1702 Cognitive Sciences (FoR)
• 2004 Linguistics (FoR)
• Association Learning (MeSH)
• Auditory Perception (MeSH)
• Developmental & Child Psychology (Science Metrix)
• Female (MeSH)
• Humans (MeSH)
• Infant (MeSH)
• Learning (MeSH)
• Male (MeSH)
• Memory (MeSH)
• Mental Recall (MeSH)
• Music (MeSH)
• Pitch Perception (MeSH)
• Psychoacoustics (MeSH)
• Time Perception (MeSH)

published in

• Developmental Science  Journal

keywords

• Association Learning
• Auditory Perception
• Female
• Humans
• Infant
• Learning
• Male
• Memory
• Mental Recall
• Music
• Pitch Perception
• Psychoacoustics
• Time Perception

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

• 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2004.00348.x

PubMed ID

• 15595370

start page

• 289

end page

• 296

volume

• 7

issue

• 3