Episodic memory for musical prosody

Prosodic cues are often informative in speech perception; similar acoustic features distinguish music performances. Three experiments addressed the role of prosodic cues in memory for music. In Experiment 1. musically trained and untrained listeners were familiarized with performances of short musical excerpts and later heard the familiarized performances as well as novel performances of the same music. All listeners identified correctly the familiarized performances. In Experiment 2, 10-month-old infants were familiarized with the same performances. In a head-turn preference procedure, infants oriented longer to the familiarized performances than to die novel performances. In Experiment 3, musically experienced listeners identified familiarized excerpts placed in different melodic contexts; identification was more accurate for excerpts whose prosodie cues (intensity and articulation) conflicted with the structure of the melodic context. These findings support episodic memory fur music that incorporates stimulus-specific acoustic features as well as abstract structural features. (C) 2001 Academic Press.