Further support for tonal schemas evidenced by altered short-term memory of pitches within a distorted musical scale context
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study revisits the stretched scale experiment presented in Shepard and Jordan (1984), in which they found that the major scale can act as a perceptual schema that overrides short-term pitch memory. Here, we examine the effect of musical background on listeners' pitch judgments. 72 participants from McGill University (n = 24: non-musicians, quasi-musicians, and musicians) listened to a stretched ascending major scale (spanning a minor ninth), followed by the initial tone of the sequence, or a decoy one half-step above the original starting tone. In a parallel condition, we presented a stretched descending major scale. All tones were sinusoidal. Participants were asked to judge the test tone in relation to the initial tone of the sequence, by describing the test tone as lower, the same, or higher. Overall, the results suggest that a shifting pitch template can affect listeners' pitch judgments. These results are consistent with Shepard and Jordan's (although our distributions of judgments significantly vary from theirs.) In the subgroup analysis, non-musicians and musicians did not significantly differ in their pitch judgment accuracy, however, significantly more musicians than non-musicians judged at least two of the four test tones correctly. Taken together, these results suggest that the pitch judgments of both non-musicians and musicians can be influenced by a shifting pitch template. Keywords: auditory perception, pitch, music, memory, schemas, cognition, cognitive neuroscience, psychoacoustics, musical training
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".