Modeling and Optimizing Forgetting and Spacing Effects during Musical Interval Training

From novice to expert, almost every musician must recognize musical intervals, the perceived pitch difference between two notes, but there have not been many empirical attempts to discover an optimal teaching technique. The current study created a method for teaching identification of consonant and dissonant tone pairs. At posttest, participants increased their ability to discern tritones from octaves, and performance was better for those who received an interleaving order of the practice trials. Data mining of the results used a novel method to capture curvilinear forgetting and spacing effects in the data and allowed a deeper analysis of the pedagogical implications of our task that revealed richer information than would have been revealed by the pretest-to-posttest comparison alone. Implications for musical education, generalization learning, and future research are discussed.