Identification of thin slices of music by university students in PEI

Abstract

Young people can often identify the artist and title of a large repertoire of popular music, but how much acoustical information is needed to do so? Krumhansl (2010) showed with audio excerpts (thin slices of music) as short as 400 ms, students performed at a level of 25% correct.The 23 students in her study however were from Cornell University and, though they were not majoring in music, had approximately 10.3 years on average of total formal music instruction. The present study explored whether this identification ability would generalize to students who had much less music training and were from a small Eastern Canadian university. Participants were 17 students (mean age 23.71 years, SD = 4.28) who had only 2.34 (3.5) years musical training.  Participants were presented with 60 400-ms excerpts of 30 songs (each with 2 excerpts) popular between 1960 to 2015. They were asked to identify the artist name and title of the work. Sixty-one per cent of the songs from the Krumhansl set were included. After this, they were presented with 15-sec excerpts of these 30 pieces and asked the same questions about them, to determine general knowledge of the songs. For the 15-sec excerpts, on average 72.94% (0.12) of the titles and 57.25% (0.17) of the artists were identified. Titles were significantly more easily identified than were artists, F(1,16)=9.32, p less than.01. For the very short excerpts, the mean title identification was 33.24% (.10) and artist identification was 29.51% (.12), both of which were significantly different from 0, t(16) = 13.14 and 9.93 respectively, p's less than .001.  This study replicates the basic finding of Krumhansl for this population and serves to illustrate the young person’s enormous storage capacity for information about popular music and its accessibility.