Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians
The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to ou...
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| Format: | Online |
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Public Library of Science
2016
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| Online Access: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5070877/ |
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pubmed-50708772016-10-27 Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians Gratton, Irene Brandimonte, Maria A. Bruno, Nicola Research Article The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to our knowledge, no systematic assessments of AT have been performed using laboratory tasks comparable to those assessing absolute pitch. In the present study, we operationalize AT as the ability to identify and reproduce tempo in the absence of rhythmic or melodic frames of reference and assess these abilities in musically trained and untrained participants. We asked 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to a seven-step `tempo scale’ of metronome beats, each associated to a numerical label, and then to perform two memory tasks. In the first task, participants heard one of the tempi and attempted to report the correct label (identification task), in the second, they saw one label and attempted to tap the correct tempo (production task). A musical and visual excerpt was presented between successive trials as a distractor to prevent participants from using previous tempi as anchors. Thus, participants needed to encode tempo information with the corresponding label, store the information, and recall it to give the response. We found that more than half were able to perform above chance in at least one of the tasks, and that musical training differentiated between participants in identification, but not in production. These results suggest that AT is relatively wide-spread, relatively independent of musical training in tempo production, but further refined by training in tempo identification. We propose that at least in production, the underlying motor representations are related to tactus, a basic internal rhythmic period that may provide a body-based reference for encoding tempo. Public Library of Science 2016-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC5070877/ /pubmed/27760198 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0163558 Text en © 2016 Gratton et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| repository_type |
Open Access Journal |
| institution_category |
Foreign Institution |
| institution |
US National Center for Biotechnology Information |
| building |
NCBI PubMed |
| collection |
Online Access |
| language |
English |
| format |
Online |
| author |
Gratton, Irene Brandimonte, Maria A. Bruno, Nicola |
| spellingShingle |
Gratton, Irene Brandimonte, Maria A. Bruno, Nicola Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| author_facet |
Gratton, Irene Brandimonte, Maria A. Bruno, Nicola |
| author_sort |
Gratton, Irene |
| title |
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| title_short |
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| title_full |
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| title_fullStr |
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| title_full_unstemmed |
Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians |
| title_sort |
absolute memory for tempo in musicians and non-musicians |
| description |
The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to our knowledge, no systematic assessments of AT have been performed using laboratory tasks comparable to those assessing absolute pitch. In the present study, we operationalize AT as the ability to identify and reproduce tempo in the absence of rhythmic or melodic frames of reference and assess these abilities in musically trained and untrained participants. We asked 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to a seven-step `tempo scale’ of metronome beats, each associated to a numerical label, and then to perform two memory tasks. In the first task, participants heard one of the tempi and attempted to report the correct label (identification task), in the second, they saw one label and attempted to tap the correct tempo (production task). A musical and visual excerpt was presented between successive trials as a distractor to prevent participants from using previous tempi as anchors. Thus, participants needed to encode tempo information with the corresponding label, store the information, and recall it to give the response. We found that more than half were able to perform above chance in at least one of the tasks, and that musical training differentiated between participants in identification, but not in production. These results suggest that AT is relatively wide-spread, relatively independent of musical training in tempo production, but further refined by training in tempo identification. We propose that at least in production, the underlying motor representations are related to tactus, a basic internal rhythmic period that may provide a body-based reference for encoding tempo. |
| publisher |
Public Library of Science |
| publishDate |
2016 |
| url |
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5070877/ |
| _version_ |
1613690067935559680 |