Using feedback to manipulate the tonal hierarchy

Résumé

The tonal hierarchy is the complex hierarchical structure that governs the organization of pitch in Western music. Recent work has shown that perception of the tonal hierarchy can be manipulated. Listeners were presented with a series of notes to establish a sense of key, and then asked to judge if a target note was in-key or out-of-key (i.e., ‘good’ or ‘bad’). When participants were given random feedback on their performance, that is, the feedback was unrelated to their actual performance, their ability to accurately detect an out-of-key note declined over the course of the experiment. When accurate feedback was restored, their ability to detect an out-of-key note returned to baseline levels. One of the limitations of this study was that the bad feedback was random, and spread across all scale degrees.  Accordingly, the goal of the current study was to see if bad feedback, focused on a specific scale degree in the tonal hierarchy could be used to alter the perception of a single note in a scale, so that a specific ‘bad’ note would be perceived as a ‘good’ note, and a specific ‘good’ note would be perceived as ‘bad’. Participants were presented with pairs of similar melodies and asked which melody contained a bad note. For each pair of melodies, a bad note was created by changing a II or IV note to a bII or #IV note. The melody pairs were otherwise identical. After a series of baseline trials, participants were given bad feedback on their performance.  That is when the bII note was reported as bad, the participants were told that their judgment was wrong, and vice versa. Surprisingly, this bad feedback had no impact on performance, suggesting that targeted bad feedback cannot be used to manipulate a single note in the tonal hierarchy.