Why Can't I Hear It?

          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