gap fill melodic archetypes meyer e rosner

8/10/2019 Gap Fill Melodic Archetypes Meyer e Rosner

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Music PerceptionWinter 2000, Vol. 18, No. 2, 139153

2000 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIAALL RIGHTS RESERVED .

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Address correspondence to Paul von Hippel, School of Music, Ohio State University,1866 College Ave., Columbus, OH 43210. (e-mail: [email protected]).

ISSN: 0730-7829. Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions,University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223.

Questioning a Melodic Archetype: Do Listeners Use Gap-Fill to Classify Melodies?

PA U L V O N H I P P E LOhio State University and Stanford University

Leonard B. Meyer (1973) argued that listeners experience of melodies isshaped by certain melodic archetypes. Among these archetypes is gap-fill, a name for melodies in which an early skip is followed by some of the pitches that have been skipped over. In experiments conducted withRosner, Meyer tested gap-fills effect on the ways in which listeners com-pare and classify melodies (B. S. Rosner & L. B. Meyer, 1982, 1986).The present reanalyses of Rosner and Meyers experimental results, how-ever, suggest that gap-fill played little or no role. Together with an earlierstudy suggesting that gap-fill has no influence on melodic shape (P. vonHippel & D. Huron, 2000), these reanalyses tend to weaken the claimthat gap-fill is an important concept for classifying melodies.

Received June 14, 1999; accepted July 8, 2000.

C LASSIFICATION is one of the oldest tasks in music analysis. Throughouthistory, scholars have classified music according to mode, meter, char-acter, and social function, as well as other qualities. Ordinary listeners,too, are remarkably adept at classifying music, as demonstrated by theirsplit-second ability to recognize the format of a radio station (Perrott &Gjerdingen, 1999).

Psychologists studying musical classification have often invoked the con-cepts of prototype or schema . A schema is a mental representation for theway that features fit together in a familiar settingfor example, the objectsand events to expect in a restaurant (Graessner & Nakamura, 1982; Schank& Abelson, 1977). In music, schematic knowledge enables listeners to pre-dict the pitches and chord progressions that are most likely to occur in agiven key (Krumhansl & Castellano, 1983). Schemas are often related to

prototypes , which are exemplary or idealized representatives of a class; a

robin, for example, is a highly prototypical bird. Prototypes are used as


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140 Paul von Hippel

mental references to which other members of a class are compared (Posner& Keele, 1970; Rosch, 1978). In music, for example, listeners tend to hearchromatically inflected melodies as departures from diatonic prototypes(Bartlett & Dowling, 1988; Cohen, Thorpe, & Trehub, 1987).

Among psychological theories of melodic classification, the ideas of Leonard Meyer (1973) are strikingly ambitious. Instead of classifying melo-dies by such basic qualities as chromatic or diatonic content, Meyer hasproposed a more refined classification based on a handful of melodic ar-chetypes. Archetypes, according to Meyer s colleague Robert Gjerdingen,are [Meyer s] term for innate or universally valid schemata (Gjerdingen,1988, p. 7). Meyer sometimes refer to archetypes as archetypal sche-mata a usage that corroborates Gjerdingen s definition (Meyer, 1973).Meyer s archetypes have also been discussed under the heading of proto-types (Gjerdingen, 1991, p. 131). The connection between archetypes andprototypes is not hard to see: when Meyer (1973) discusses archetypes interms of exemplary cases, or when he rates musical examples according tohow well they exemplify a given archetype (Rosner & Meyer, 1986, Tables15), one could certainly imagine that it is prototypes that are under dis-cussion.

Despite these correspondences, it is not clear that Meyer would claimfor archetypes all of the measurable effects that are associated with proto-types and schemas. For example, schemas often induce memory errors:features that violate the prevailing schema tend to be forgotten, and fea-tures that fit the prevailing schema tend to be remembered even if they didnot occur (Brewer & Treyens, 1981). A distinctive feature of prototypes,

on the other hand, is asymmetries in perceived similarity: when a proto-type is at work, the perceived similarity of two items depends on the orderor the grammatical relationship in which they are presented (Tversky, 1977;Bartlett & Dowling, 1988). These characteristic effects of prototypes andschemas have never been claimed for Meyer s archetypes. Instead, with theexception of two experiments to be discussed in this article (Rosner &Meyer, 1982, 1986), Meyer s archetypes remain a theoretical concept ratherthan an operational one.

The archetypes identified by Meyer include linear, triadic, comple-mentary, changing-note, and Adeste Fideles melodies (Meyer, 1973;Rosner & Meyer, 1986). Perhaps the most important of Meyer s arche-types, however, is gap-fill. A gap-fill melody typically begins with a large

skip (or gap), then continues by filling in scale tones that have been skippedover. Figure 1 displays Meyer s most straightforward examples of gap-fill:the chorus from the show tune Over the Rainbow and the fugue subjectfrom Geminiani s Concerto Grosso in E Minor, op. 3, no. 3 (Rosner &Meyer, 1982).


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141Do Listeners Use Gap-Fill to Classify Melodies?

Meyer has written more about gap-fill than about any other archetype(Meyer, 1956, 1973; Rosner & Meyer, 1982, 1986). Perhaps this is be-cause the gap-fill concept fits so well with Meyer s ideas about melodicshape and expectation. Meyer (1956) has claimed that listeners, after hear-ing a gap, expect it to be filled in a claim that fits the results of severalcognitive experiments (e.g., Schellenberg, 1997; Schmuckler, 1989). Meyer(1956) further claims that many melodies are constructed to satisfy an ex-pectation for gap-fill. Indeed, he argues, this may be the reason why centu-ries of pedagogues have taught that a skip should be followed by a con-trary step (e.g., Nanino & Nanino, ca. 1600; Fux, 1725/1943; Prout, 1890;Kostka & Payne, 1995). The prevalence of gap-fill melodies, in turn, mightexplain why listeners would develop an archetypal schema for representing

them.This web of ideas related to gap-fill has recently frayed. Statistical analy-ses have shown that, contrary to centuries of teaching, melodies are notgenerally constructed to fill gaps. Instead, the melodic shape that Meyercalls gap-fill seems to be an artifact of constraints on range or tessitura(von Hippel & Huron, 2000). Skips tend to land near the extremes of amelody s tessitura, and from those extremes, a melody has little choice butto retreat by changing direction little choice, that is, but to regress to-ward the mean.

If melodies are not constructed to fill gaps, it seems reasonable to reopenthe question of whether gap-fill is really a psychological archetype. To ad-dress this question, I reanalyzed two sets of experiments designed to test

the archetypal status of the gap-fill pattern (Rosner & Meyer, 1982, 1986).To the degree that the experimental results can be interpreted, the reanaly-ses suggest that gap-fill had little if any effect on listeners. These findingsencourage further skepticism regarding the psychological importance of gap-fill.

Fig. 1. Two gap-fill melodies. Top: the chorus from Over the Rainbow, by Harold Arlenand E. Y. Harburg. Bottom: the first-movement fugue subject from Geminiani s ConcertoGrosso in E Minor, op. 3, no. 3. Both melodies begin with large skips or gaps that aregradually filled in.


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142 Paul von Hippel

An Experiment on Learning

The earliest experiment on the gap-fill archetype was carried out byRosner and Meyer in 1982. This experiment was designed to test the au-thors claim that archetypes are easily learned (p. 319) a claim thatcould also apply to prototypes or schemas. Specifically, Rosner and Meyersought to test whether listeners could learn by example that is, withoutexplicit instruction to recognize the presence or absence of the gap-fillpattern.

At the beginning of the experiment, listeners heard two gap-fill melo-dies. Listeners were not told that these melodies were called gap-fill, norwere they told the melodies defining attributes. Instead, listeners were simplytold that the melodies were Type A. After hearing these two examples,

listeners began a training session in which they learned to categorize 16melodies by using the Type A label. Eight of these melodies were meant toillustrate gap-fill (though none was as clear a specimen as the examples inFigure 1); the remaining 8 melodies were intended to be foils. After hearingeach melody, listeners guessed whether the melody was Type A, and theexperimenter told them whether their answer was correct. This trainingsession could go on until the entire set of 16 melodies had been played 12times.

For the introductory stage of a cognitive experiment, this is quite a lot of training. Because each playing of the training set took about 8 minutes(Rosner & Meyer, 1982, p. 329), the training stage could last up to 96 (12 8) minutes more than an hour and a half. To put the point another way,

listeners could receive feedback on up to 192 (12 16) practice classifica-tions. Not all of the listeners received so much feedback, however. If alistener classified 14 of the 16 melodies correctly, and did so two times in arow, the training session ended, and the listener was considered to havepassed. Of the 17 listeners who completed the study, 14 passed this train-ing stage.

The chances are extremely remote that 14 of 17 listeners could havepassed the training stage by indiscriminate guessing ( p < 10 -58).1 It does not

1. It is not clear from Rosner and Meyer s (1982) article whether listeners were told howmany Type A and non-Type A melodies they would hear. If listeners were privy to thisinformation, then the independence of the data would be reduced, because the likelihood of a Type A answer would depend partly on the number of Type A answers that were givenearlier. If the independence of the data is compromised in this way, then statistical tests inthe first half of this article and in Rosner and Meyer s (1982) original analyses exagger-ate the significance of the results.

Assuming that the data are independent, however, the probability given in the text ( p

gap fill melodic archetypes meyer e rosner

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