Van Hedger Stephen C, Heald Shannon Lm, Nusbaum Howard C
Department of Psychology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2018 Apr;71(4):879-891. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2017.1307427. Epub 2018 Jan 1.
Most individuals have reliable long-term memories for the pitch of familiar music recordings. This pitch memory (1) appears to be normally distributed in the population, (2) does not depend on explicit musical training and (3) only seems to be weakly related to differences in listening frequency estimates. The present experiment was designed to assess whether individual differences in auditory working memory could explain variance in long-term pitch memory for music recordings. In Experiment 1, participants first completed a musical note adjustment task that has been previously used to assess working memory of musical pitch. Afterward, participants were asked to judge the pitch of well-known music recordings, which either had or had not been shifted in pitch. We found that performance on the pitch working memory task was significantly related to performance in the pitch memory task using well-known recordings, even when controlling for overall musical experience and familiarity with each recording. In Experiment 2, we replicated these findings in a separate group of participants while additionally controlling for fluid intelligence and non-pitch-based components of auditory working memory. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that participants could not accurately judge the pitch of unfamiliar recordings, suggesting that our method of pitch shifting did not result in unwanted acoustic cues that could have aided participants in Experiments 1 and 2. These results, taken together, suggest that the ability to maintain pitch information in working memory might lead to more accurate long-term pitch memory.
大多数人对熟悉的音乐录音音高有着可靠的长期记忆。这种音高记忆（1）在人群中似乎呈正态分布，（2）不依赖于明确的音乐训练，并且（3）似乎仅与听力频率估计差异存在微弱关联。本实验旨在评估听觉工作记忆中的个体差异是否能够解释音乐录音长期音高记忆的方差。在实验1中，参与者首先完成一项先前用于评估音乐音高工作记忆的音符调整任务。之后，要求参与者判断知名音乐录音的音高，这些录音的音高要么被改变了，要么未被改变。我们发现，即使在控制了总体音乐经验以及对每段录音的熟悉程度之后，音高工作记忆任务的表现与使用知名录音的音高记忆任务的表现仍显著相关。在实验2中，我们在另一组参与者中重复了这些发现，同时还控制了流体智力以及听觉工作记忆中基于非音高的成分。在实验3中，我们证明参与者无法准确判断不熟悉录音的音高，这表明我们的音高转换方法并未产生可能在实验1和实验2中帮助参与者的不必要声学线索。综合这些结果表明，在工作记忆中保持音高信息的能力可能会导致更准确的长期音高记忆。
