Infants' perception of musical relations in short transposed tone sequences.

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Abstract
Infants 7 to 11 months of age were tested for their detection of a frequency relational change of one semitone in a five-note melody. Melodies were presented in various transpositions that altered absolute frequencies of the component tones but preserved the frequency ratios. In Experiment I, two background melodies were based on major and minor triads, both of which occur commonly in Western tonal music. Contrast melodies were minor or major triads, respectively. Infants were able to discriminate these contrasting melodies that differed from the background melodies by one semitone. In Experiment 2, infants were found to detect a semitone difference more easily when the major triad was background and a relatively uncommon triad, the augmented triad, was the contrast. They failed to make this discrimination when the roles of these two melodies as background and contrast were reversed. In a final study, infants discriminated the major and minor backgrounds used in Experiments 1 and 2 from contrasting variations, called inversions, that did not differ in triad quality as did previous background/contrast pairs. Therefore, encoding of triad quality alone cannot account for the evidence of discriminability in Experiments 1 and 2. Rather, the ability to detect a semitone difference in transposed melodies indicates that infants can respond to precise relations between the component tones of a melody based on familiar or stable structures. These findings also imply that sets of tones that are unfamiliar or unstable may present encoding or memory difficulties for infants, as has been found for children and adults.

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