Music cognition research has adopted a methodology of psycholinguistics to investigate listeners’ understanding of musical structures: a to-be-processed event is presented in different contexts, in which it is either related (and supposed to be expected) or unrelated (and supposed to be unexpected). The rationale is that the context activates listeners’ knowledge about a system’s structures and functions, and this activation allows expectancy formation for future events, which then influence event processing. The priming paradigm is an implicit investigation method that allows studying nonmusicians’ implicit musical knowledge, which may be more sophisticated than explicit judgments suggest. Use of this method has provided evidence for implicit musical knowledge in nonmusicians, but also in children younger than previously shown when using explicit methods and in amusic individuals who are impaired in explicit musical tasks.
The
basic design consists of a prime context (here the first seven chords of the
sequence) and a target event (here the last chord). The relations between prime
and target are systematically manipulated: for music, this manipulation
concerns tonal relatedness or tonal functions as defined by music theory. In
the present case, the target chord functions either as a strongly related, stable tonic chord (I) or as a less related, subdominant chord (IV). Participants are not required to
make direct judgments on the relation between the prime context, but make
speeded accuracy judgments on a perceptual feature of the target chord without
explicitly judging the overall musical context (or the manipulated musical
relations). For example, participants have to decide whether the target chord
is acoustically consonant or dissonant, whether it is sung on the phoneme /i/
or /u/, or whether it is played by one of two possible musical timbres.