BRIEF REPORT Melody recognition revisited: influence of melodic Gestalt on the encoding of relational pitch information Yune-Sang Lee & Petr Janata & Carlton Frost & Zachary Martinez & Richard Granger Published online: 28 May 2014 # Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2014 Abstract Melody recognition entails the encoding of pitch intervals between successive notes. While it has been shown that a whole melodic sequence is better encoded than the sum of its constituent intervals, the underlying reasons have remained opaque. Here, we compared listeners’ accuracy in encoding the relative pitch distance between two notes (for example, C, E) of an interval to listeners accuracy under the following three mod- ifications: (1) doubling the duration of each note (C – E –), (2) repetition of each note (C, C, E, E), and (3) adding a preceding note (G, C, E). Repeating (2) or adding an extra note (3) improved encoding of relative pitch distance when the melodic sequences were transposed to other keys, but lengthening the duration (1) did not improve encoding relative to the standard two-note interval sequences. Crucially, encoding accuracy was higher with the four-note sequences than with long two-note sequences despite the fact that sensory (pitch) information was held constant. We interpret the results to show that re-forming the Gestalts of two-note intervals into two-note “melodies” results in more accurate encoding of relational pitch information due to a richer structural context in which to embed the interval. Keywords Music . Melody . Gestalt . Interval . Pitch . Recognition Introduction Humans can easily recognize, reproduce, and remember melo- dies—sequences of musical notes. Except for extreme popula- tions (e.g., listeners with absolute pitch or amusia), normal listeners recognize melodies based largely upon the relative sizes of the intervals between successive pitches, an ability still robustly preserved even when the entire frequency range of the music is shifted up or down (i.e., the key is changed). Relative pitch processing may be, if not innate, acquired early in development. For example, Plantinga and Trainor (2005) established that 5.5- to 6.5-month-old infants, after listening to a melody for 7 days, preferred to listen to a novel melody rather than the original melody, regardless of the key in which the original was played at test. Their subsequent experiment ruled out a possibility that the infants remembered absolute pitch information, suggesting that, like adults, their long-term repre- sentation of the melody was based on the sequence of relative- pitch intervals between tones. Electrophysiological studies have indicated that relative pitch interval processing occurs in an automatic fashion, even among non-musicians (Trainor et al., 2002). For example, Trainor et al. (2002) showed that an occasional deviation of ending note position (i.e., outside of the key) elicited a mismatch negativity (MMN)—a brain re- sponse commonly regarded as an indicator of automatic change detection in the absence of attention towards a stimulus. Intriguingly, relative pitch information is better encoded when the length of the melodic sequence is increased to some extent, suggesting that greater melody note-count confers per- ceptual benefits in encoding relational pitch information. For example, Edworthy (1985) showed that recognizing a note that deviated from a key became easier as the number of notes in the Y.<S. Lee (*) : C. Frost : Z. Martinez : R. Granger Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA e-mail: yunesang.lee@gmail.com P. Janata Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, CA 95618, USA Present Address: Y.-S. Lee Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, 3 West Gates. 3400 Spruce st., Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA Present Address: C. Frost Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research II, 1111 Highland Ave., Madison, WI 53705, USA Psychon Bull Rev (2015) 22:163–169 DOI 10.3758/s13423-014-0653-y