Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Online Detection Of Tonal Pop-Out In Modulating Contexts, Petr Janata, Jeffrey L. Birk, Barbara Tillmann, Jamshed J. Bharucha

Dartmouth Scholarship

We investigated the spontaneous detection of "wrong notes" in a melody that modulated continuously through all 24 major and minor keys. Three variations of the melody were composed, each of which had distributed within it 96 test tones of the same pitch, for example, A2. Thus, the test tones would blend into some keys and pop out in others. Participants were not asked to detect or judge specific test tones; rather, they were asked to make a response whenever they heard a note that they thought sounded wrong or out of place. This task enabled us to obtain subjective measures …