Musical Change Deafness: The Inability to Detect Change in a Non-speech Auditory Domain

This article presents two experiments investigating the degree to which listeners can detect changes in melodies. In both studies, pairs of melodies were presented to a group of professional musicians and a group of non-musicians. In Experiment 1, musical structure and musical expertise were explored with stylistic, non-stylistic, and random melodies. Experiment 2 utilized a full-factorial design to examine tonality, musical interval, metrical position, note duration, and musical expertise. Significant effects were found for several variables, but tonality had a particularly large effect on performance. Under some conditions, large changes between the melodies went undetected even by professional musicians. These results suggest that listeners form a memory representation for schematically consistent tones, which we refer to as the "musical gist". These results also suggest a comparison with change blindness, in which viewers can fail to notice salient changes in a visual scene, raising the question of whether similar processing operates in both modalities.