Development of tonality induction: plasticity, exposure, and training.

Abstract

Tonality induction is the natural outcome of acoustic redundancies in music and the predisposition of the brain to represent these redundancies. In the simplest case, tonality induction relies on frequency resolution and a memory accumulator. A review of the literature suggests that these and other more sophisticated building blocks (analysis of complex tones and sensitivity to sequential characteristics of musical patterns) are in place to contribute to tonality induction in the first year of life. As further revealed by life-span studies of preference and recognition for stylistically different popular music excerpts, two other constraints must also be considered: (1) brain plasticity and (2) degree of exposure to music of particular styles. The importance of a final factor, (3) formal music performance training, is shown in studies of (a) the benefits of the major triad frequency ratio relations (4: 5: 6) on memory (absolute judgment) for tones in an unfamiliar context (b) the applicability of a model based on a key-finding algorithm to pitch memory in a tonal context, and (c) the probe-tone task.