SHORT TERM PITCH MEMORY IN WESTERN vs. OTHER EQUAL TEMPERAMENT TUNING SYSTEMS

This study investigates the use of short-term memory for pitch recognition in a Western (12-tone) vs. a 10-tone equal temperament context. 10 subjects with at least one year of formal music and theory training participated in an experiment that consisted of two identical music listening tests (one per tuning system) in which they were trained to recall a reference tone and count the number of times it recurred in various short monophonic melodies. In the parts of the experiment where subjects used their short-term memory to execute one-to-one comparisons between the given reference tone and the melody tones, the results were equivalent for both tuning modes. On the other hand, when subjects tried to recall the reference tone directly from long-term memory, the results were noticeably better for the Western tuning context.