What+do+musically+educated+ears+hear+versus+non-musical+ears?

Trevor LeVieux 5/10/09
 * What do musically educated ears hear versus non-musical ears? **

Intuition would tell you that we all hear the same music, because the audio source is the same, but cognitively we attach to different things in music. Harmony and melody and keys are words that everyone that has even minimal contact with music has heard of, but it seems as if only the musically trained distinguish songs because of these things. In the study designed and executed by Rita Wolpert, ( [|Recognition of Melody, Harmonic Accompaniment, and Instrumentation: Musicians vs. Nonmusicians]) 100% of the musically educated that participated put the songs that have the same melody together, where as 95% of the non-musicians put together songs that only had timbral similarities, not the same song at all. This result would seem to point to the fact that all the work and effort put into making intricate melodies may not be as important to non musical people as musicians think. In another experiment done by Thomas G. Bever and Robert J. Chiarello in //[|Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Nonmusicians]//, it was found that ”musically sophisticated listeners could accurately recognize isolated excerpts from a tone sequence, whereas musically naive listeners could not. However, musically naive people could recognize the entire tone sequences”. I think this was mostly due to the immersion musically educated people need to put themselves into music and notes and therefore become very comfortable with aspects of melodies. These findings are very interesting, but the main finding in the mentioned paper was that musically experienced listeners recognize melodies better in the right ear than the left year. However, this is just the opposite for the musically inexperienced. This would point me to believe that musical cognition may be more based in nature than nurture. Most would believe that musical taste is based on upbringing and social influences, but there might be either something physical that is built into us when we were born or something that comes with being surrounded by music. Some of this was found in //[|Melody recognition by two-month-old infants]// by Judy Plantinga and Laurel Trainor. Musical cognitions seem to be something that is learned. Musicians that have greater knowledge and musical capabilities have proven that they have much better understanding and memory when it comes to understanding melody, and timing judgments as in //[|Exposure Influences Expressive Timing Judgements]// in Music by Henkjan Honing and Olivia Ladinig which shows musicians can pick out timing issues in musical pieces much more than strictly musical listeners.