Inducing musical-interval learning by combining task practice with periods of stimulus exposure alone

Abstract

A key component of musical proficiency is the ability to discriminate between and identify musical intervals, or fixed ratios between pitches. Acquiring these skills requires training, but little is known about how to best arrange the trials within a training session. To address this issue, learning on a musical-interval comparison task was evaluated for two four-day training regimens that employed equal numbers of stimulus presentations per day. A regimen of continuous practice yielded no learning, but a regimen that combined practice and stimulus exposure alone generated clear improvement. Learning in the practice-plus-exposure regimen was due to the combination of the two experiences, because two control groups who received only either the practice or the exposure from that regimen did not learn. Posttest performance suggested that this improvement in comparison learning generalized to an untrained stimulus type and an untrained musical-interval identification task. Naïve comparison performance, but not learning, was better for larger pitch-ratio differences and for individuals with more musical experience. The reported benefits of the practice-plus-exposure regimen mirror the outcomes for fine-grained discrimination and speech tasks, suggesting that a general learning principle is involved. In practical terms, it appears that combining practice and stimulus exposure alone is a particularly effective configuration for improving musical-interval perception.

Keywords: Music cognition; Perceptual learning; Psychoacoustics; Sound recognition.

Figure 1.

Training block types. Schematics of a single trial for each of the three block types: During practice blocks (left panel), listeners were presented two musical-intervals and asked to indicate which of the two was a 4^th. The starting pitch of each interval was selected at random, so the two intervals in each trial usually began on a different pitch. During exposure blocks (middle panel), listeners performed a non-auditory symbol-to-number matching task while in the background two examples of a 4^th were presented on each “trial”. During silence blocks (right panel), listeners were presented the same visual cues as during practice blocks, but without any sounds, and were asked to respond by making a “guess” for each trial. Listeners were trained using various combinations of the three block types.

Figure 2.

Naïve performance (day 1). On each trial, listeners were presented a target musical interval (a 4^th) and one of three foils (a 3^rd, 5^th or 6^th) and asked to indicate which interval was the target. A. Individual response accuracy on day 1 separated by foil for 28 listeners (gray circles; raw data) with means and standard errors as estimated by a multi-level regression (bars and error bars). B. Individual response accuracy on day 1 (gray circles; raw data) for each of the three foils (x-axes) compared to another of the foils (y-axes) for the three pairwise comparisons (panels), with means and standard errors as estimated by the multi-level regression (lines and gray regions). C. Individual response accuracy on day 1 across years of musical experience (gray circles; raw data) with the mean and standard error of this relationship as estimated by the multi-level regression (line and gray region).

Figure 3.

Performance across days. A. Mean response accuracy (symbols and error bars; from raw data) across days (x-axis) on the trained musical-interval comparison task, and means and standard errors for those data as estimated by a single-level regression (lines and gray regions), for each of four training regimens (symbols). Each training session consisted of (1) continuous practice on the comparison task (All-Practice; n=7; gray diamond), (2) periods of practice alternating with periods of stimulus exposure in the absence of practice (Practice+Exposure; n=7; black square), (3) periods of practice alternating with periods of silence (Practice+Silence; n=7; dark gray triangle), or (4) periods of stimulus exposure alone alternating with periods of silence (Practice+Exposure; n=7; white circle), all for the same total duration. B. Individual response accuracy (symbols and dotted lines; raw data) across days (x-axis) and training regimens (panels), with means and standard errors as estimated by a multilevel regression (solid lines and gray regions) for learners (black lines) and non-learners (gray lines). C. Individual mean response accuracy on day 1 (x-axis) and day 4 (y-axis) for each training regimen (symbols), and the fits by single-level regression for each group (lines).

Figure 4.

Performance on the final day (day 4) for trained and untrained stimuli. A. Mean response accuracy on day 4 for the trained musical-interval comparison task with the trained pure-tone (solid bars) and untrained triangle-tone (striped bars) stimuli for each of four training regimens (shades) as estimated by a single-level regression, with standard errors from the regression (error bars) and individual data (gray circles; raw data). The dotted line indicates chance performance. B. Individual response accuracy on day 4 for pure-tone (x-axis) and triangle-tone (y-axis) stimuli, for each of the four training regimens (symbols; raw data), with means and standard errors as estimated by a single-level regression (line and gray region).

Figure 5.

Performance on the final day (day 4) for trained and untrained tasks. A. Mean response accuracy on day 4 for the untrained musical-interval comparison task (bars) for each of the four training regimens (shades) as estimated by a single-level regression, with standard errors from the regression (error bars) and individual data (gray circles; raw data). B. Individual response accuracy on day 4 for the trained musical-interval comparison task (x-axis) and the untrained comparison task (y-axis) for each of the four training regimens (symbols; raw data), with means and standard errors as estimated by a single-level regression (line and gray region). C. Individual response accuracy on day 4 for the trained musical-interval comparison task (x-axis) and the untrained identification task (y-axis) for each interval (symbols), with means and standard errors as estimated by a single-level regression (lines and gray regions).