Have you been in a rock or musical concert with a friend who
is crazy with music proved by his amazing talent in playing an instrument? Or
just having time doing something else while a music was being played and
suddenly, he noticed something wrong or something exceedingly excellent about
the music and will tell you how good the guitar riff at the end and it would be
better if it is key of A than key of E? You will be amazed and will suddenly
ask yourself, how did he do that? Why can he observe it while you are just
simply enjoying the music regardless of its elements?
Well, what
you exclusively experienced is the so-called change deafness or inability to
detect change in sound stimuli present in the environment. In a study conducted
by Agres and Krumhansl (2008), change blindness between professional musicians
and non-musicians was scientifically investigated. There were 15 undergraduate
students who were the non musician group and 11 professional musician which
formed the musician group participated in the study. It was a two-part
experiment in which in the first part, the effects of musical structure and
musical expertise were explored on the ability to detect changes of a tone
within a melody using stylistic, non stylistic and random melodies. In the
second part, full-factorial design was utilized to examine change blindness as
directed by tonality, musical interval, metrical position, note duration, and musical
expertise. From the variables being examined, tonality really contributed to
the significant change in the performance of both groups. It was also
generalized that there are a lot of interacting parameters that contributed to
detection of musical change, however, listeners do not get into the detailed
information of the music structure but only to the gist of the salient property
of music of which tonality is part of that gist. Tonality is generally the key in which a music is played or the
relations between the notes of a scale or key. There were significant changes
(tonality, etc.) on how Professional Musician group detect more sensitively
changes in the music than the Non musician group for stylistic music but for
non stylistic or random melody, both groups could not reliably encode features
of the music. One reason could be that tonal and metrical structure present in
stylistic melody gives the listeners a template on which to build their gist.
Just like in visual perception, changes in stimuli were difficult to be
detected when it has no schematic representation and not presented consistently
which is true for non stylistic melody or random melody for they are not
encoded in the working memory. This suggests that the reason relatively large
changes in the melodies that are not detected is because some tones are not
retained in working memory.
Well, as
for me who is somehow exposed to music, it just gave the approval that I can
sense changes in a song whether it was played or sang in flat or sharp but I
have nothing to say when it is just a random tone. Thus, the next time you will
go to a musical concert with a friend whose a musician expect that He’s really
greater than you in noticing changes but when both of you are placed in a space
in the middle of the city where melodies from different medium such as beeping
car, shouts of people, he is not at par with you.
Source: http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2008/pdfs/p969.pdf
