Download Tony Mowrer is assistant professor of music at California State

Tony Mowrer is assistant professor of music
at California State University, Fresno, where
he teaches courses in music education and
conducts the Men’s and Women’s Choruses.
[email protected]
Choral directors use tonal memory tests as one
of their ability assessment instruments to gain knowledge about their singers’ tonal memory. Moreover,
memory tests can serve as audition information
when selecting students for choral ensembles.
Louis Diercks reported the implementation of tonal
memory tests as part of the audition process for
225– 270 singers at Ohio State University.1 Thomas
Wine reported that tonal memory tests are part
of all-state audition procedures in many states.2
Authors of choral methods textbooks, including
Brinson,3 Hylton,4 and Phillips,5 suggest the value
of their function and usefulness in
assessing singers’ tonal memory
abilities.
Frequently, many students who
audition for choral ensembles
prove to be poor sight-readers.
Consequently, conductors require certain musical assessment
information to help determine
not only whether their students
may become better readers, but
also whether they are potential
candidates for learning the vast
and varied repertoire presented
throughout a given school year.
Because tonal memory tests have
been shown to be good predictors of a student’s musical contribution to a choral ensemble,6 an
explication of their characteristics
and application is warranted.
ory. While in short-term memory, information must
be rehearsed, or repeated, to prevent its rapid decay.
Most of us experience this decay phenomenon when
trying to remember small pieces of information
such as an address, a date, or a phone number. If this
information is repeated, it becomes associated with
other relevant pieces of information already stored
in long-term memory. The new information is then
placed in the final stage of the memory process:
long-term memory. To retrieve information from
long-term memory, one must rely on cues that help
determine if the information is there.
Memory System
Before exploring the nature of
tonal memory, it may be helpful
to have some concept of how the
memory system works. According
to Loftus,7 information must pass
through short-term memory to
become part of long-term memChoral Journal • May 2010
21
Tonal Memory in the Choral Audition
Almost anything can be a cue:
sights, smells, or sounds are common cues. The sight of campfire
flames, for example, can be a reminder of a particular unpleasant
fire experienced as a child. The
sound of screeching tires may be a
reminder of an automobile accident.
Cues may, of course, be different for
different people because the cues
and the information to which they
are linked are rooted in individual
experiences.
How much can the average
person remember? George Miller8
studied the amount of information
a person can place in short-term
memory. He assumed that nearly
all information given a person is
recoverable, if initial observations
are correct. If, on the other hand,
the observer makes errors, the
information recovered will be
considerably less than the amount
of information originally transmitted. Moreover, Miller assumed that
the more information transmitted
to the observer, the more mistakes the
observer will make when repeating the
information. The amount of information
accurately repeated will level off at some
value. When recalling information, people
will begin to become confused as they reach
their personal limit. After reviewing several
studies about memory, Miller concluded that
the limit of a person’s short-term memory
constitutes—on average—seven pieces of
information.
Miller believed that we compensate
for this limitation in a variety of ways. For
example, one way we compensate is by
reorganizing information so that it becomes
organized into larger and larger chunks of
information. An inexperienced reader, for
example, might listen to each individual
vowel and consonant as a separate chunk.
As the reader becomes more experienced,
these sounds become organized as words
and, later, as phrases. Miller refers to this
reorganization as recoding. His suggestion
that a person learns to recode information
is important to musicians. A musician routinely recodes tonal information into chunks
that make possible the retention of large
amounts of music. As with the spoken word,
22
the chunks used to recode tonal information
will most likely be related to the musical syntax a person is most accustomed to hearing.
Consequently, rather than remembering the
individual pitches C– E– G, one may simply
remember a pattern as a major triad and
reduce the information remembered from
three pieces of information to a single piece
of information.
Davies9 noted that the human mind
naturally remembers a melody better than
a random sequence of tones. He observed
that a melody will always be a sequence of
tones, but a sequence of tones will not always be a melody. He further notes that the
ability to perceive melody depends on the
listener’s ability to organize (recode) tones
into a meaningful pattern (chunk).
Other researchers (Long,1 0 Dowling,1 1
Pembrook,1 2 ) observed that subjects responded more accurately to tonal melodies
than to atonal melodies. Attneave and
Olson1 3 found that people rarely attend
to individual pitches. Rather, a person gives
attention to an entire sequence that is recognizable as a melodic phrase.
Korenman and Peynircioglu1 4 observed
that musicians learned meaningful melodies
(Figure 1) faster than did non-musicians, and
they remembered them better than lessmeaningful melodies (Figure 2).
Korenman and Peynircioglu also discovered that non-musicians learned less
meaningful melodies more rapidly than did
musicians. From this study, one may conclude
that, although a musician may be expected
to learn and perform highly dissonant music,
when dealing with short-term memory, as
is the case of a tonal memory test, the use
of less-meaningful melodies may be more
likely to identify non-musicians rather than
musicians.
Tonal Memory Tests
Many choral directors create their own
tonal memory tests. These tests usually consist of having a student hear and sing several
melodies that increase in melodic difficulty
until the student “vocally stumbles.” Some directors may determine the content of each
melody by whim of the moment, opinion of
the student’s ability, or consideration of the
anticipated memory needs of the chorus
members. In the case of all-state auditions,
however, some states employ a composer
Choral Journal • May 2010
to create the tonal memory tests.
While their use seems fairly universal,
what do we know of how a tonal memory
test works? Further, what research can
guide us in the creation of appropriate tonal
memory tests?
With the exception of the study by Korenman and Peynircioglu, procedures used in
studies of tonal memory did not require that
subjects sing entire melodies. Researchers
asked subjects to indicate whether pitches or
patterns presented in pairs were the same
or different. In some studies, subjects were
asked to sing the apparent tonic of a particular pattern or another pitch integral to
the pattern played.The procedures of these
studies were different from the standard
practices of most music teachers, especially
those who direct choral ensembles. Typically,
choir directors ask students to remember
and sing complete melodies.
During this author’s 30 years of choral
directing, personal observations of many
students indicate that they remember short
melodic patterns easily while other students
are more limited in their ability to remember
them.This discrepancy does not seem to be
related to a student’s ability to read prior to
the audition. In fact, many students who cannot read, display a superior tonal memory.
The ability to remember and rehearse short
melodic phrases and place them in longterm memory are critical for a singer to
function successfully in a choral ensemble.
The ability to sing a short melodic
pattern involves skill in singing along with
memory for musical information. Singing
skill requires the ability to coordinate the
muscles of the throat, breathing mechanism,
and the tongue and mouth with the mind’s
ear. Having heard a melody or sequence of
pitches, a person must audiate (engage in
inner hearing) the pitch sequence to give it
meaning.The brain must then tell the throat
and related singing muscles what to do so
that person can sing the pitches. In essence,
two highly involved skill processes are at
work; audiation followed by singing.
Louis Diercks1 5 questioned whether he
found the best candidates for his chorus
through the standard audition. He presumed
he found the best voices, but wondered
whether he was choosing the musicians with
the greatest potential. He observed that a
student’s performance on sight-singing tests
Choral Journal • May 2010
longer may prove to be counter-productive. Doumont1 6 suggests limiting
otherwise unstructured material to
fewer than seven notes with five as
the limit—three notes being optimal. If
an ensemble routinely performs atonal
music, a director should consider
inserting some atonal examples into
the tonal memory test in the audition.
If this procedure is done, it would be
best to limit that sample’s length to
between three and five notes.
only reflected the student’s present status
as a sight-reader rather than that student’s
potential strength as a musician. One might
presume we all want students who have
potential as musicians. Consequently, some
thoughts about tonal memory testing might
be useful.
Based on the information gathered from
studies of tonal memory, the following recommendations are made:
• An item in a test of tonal memory must be
relatively short, approximately seven
notes. Miller suggested that a person’s
short-term memory would be about
seven notes. To find how far a person
might stretch, a sample melody might
be as long as 9 notes, but anything
Choral
• An item in a test of tonal memory must
be melodic rather than merely a sequence of tones. A melody will always
be a sequence of tones but a sequence
of tones will not always be a melody.
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23
Tonal Memory in the Choral Audition
Though each figure
is short, Figure 3 has
a clear tonic and the
melodic line begins
and ends on the
tonic. The melody
in Figure 4, however,
may be perceived
by some to be nothing more than
a sequence of tones.
A person’s ear listens for melodic
information it can use as a cue for the
memory (Figure 3). Observe the difference between Figure 3 and Figure 4.
• Most, if not all, items in a test of
tonal memory should be tonal.
Some atonal music sounds much
like a sequence of tones rather
than a melody, particularly to the
musically inexperienced student.
Further, as Korenman and Peynircioglu
learned, non-musicians seemed better
able to repeat the less-meaningful
melody than was the musician. If the
aim is to identify potential musicians, it
seems valuable for the melody to be
meaningful. For some students, even a
simple triad outlining a major or minor
tonality may prove challenging (see
Figures 5 and 6).
• To discriminate between students with a
poor tonal memory (weaker audiation skills) and students with a good
tonal memory (stronger audiation
skills), it is necessary to include items
that are more musically demanding.
These items may include melodies that
include portions of different chords,
played as broken chords (Figure 7).
Melodies of this nature give insight
into how well a student hears Western
musical syntax.
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Choral Journal • May 2010
• Moreover, it is often valuable, as an auditory stretch for the listener, to go
a bit beyond the seven-note limit
established in Miller’s studies (Figure
8). Additionally, this melody includes a
brief modulation.
• A common practice when administering
tonal memory tests is to play examples
in increasing difficulty. In this way, the
longer a student is able to accurately
sing the examples, the examples become more difficult.When the student
can no longer accurately repeat the
example, the test is concluded. One
rationale given for this approach:
students gain confidence as they accurately sing and progress through the
easier examples. As students achieve
confidence, their ability to sing the
more difficult examples increases, allowing them to perform better on the
tonal memory test. Although this rationale seems logical, researchers have
learned that this approach actually
Choral Journal • May 2010
tends to create stress and pessimism
on the part of the test-taker, reducing
the performance accuracy of the testtaker and reducing the validity of the
test. Consequently, it would be best
for the tonal memory test to have the
simple and difficult items interspersed
throughout. Because this juxtaposition
of test items serves somewhat to relax
the test-taker, the results will be more
likely to be valid. For example, it might
be wise to administer several of the
previous examples in the order shown
in Figure 9.
Conclusion
That we are capable of remembering all
that we do is amazing. For the memory
system to work, people must take advantage
of both short-term memory and long-term
memory. New memories first pass through
short-term memory where they are repeated and connected with old memories, or
cues, after which
they may become
a part of long-term
memor y. Miller
suggested that a
per son’s shor tterm memory is
limited to about
25
Tonal Memory in the Choral Audition
seven pieces of information. One way
people compensate for this limitation is by
reorganizing information into chunks. When
working with language, individual letters will
be reorganized (chunked) into words, words
will be reorganized into sentences, and so on.
This is important to musicians who reorganize tonal information into chunks (individual
notes become part of longer musical words
and sentences) so they can remember large
amounts of music.This reorganization will be
based on the musical syntax that musician is
accustomed to hearing.
Researchers have found that people respond better to tonal melodies than atonal
melodies. This should not be surprising
because of the way the memory system
works. People naturally reorganize musical
material into chunks that fit the musical syntax they are accustomed to hearing. What
may be more surprising is the finding that
non-musicians actually learn atonal melodies
more quickly and remember them better
than musicians.
In a large choral program, the audition
task may be arduous and time-consuming.
To help them make wise membership ap-
26
pointments, conductors often include a
tonal memory test in the audition. If properly constructed and administered, the tonal
memory test will help a conductor predict
which prospective choir member will best
serve the ensemble’s needs. If not constructed and administered properly, however,
the tonal memory test can potentially, and
inadvertently, cause the director to choose
poorer musicians. Tonal memory tests that
are tonal and consist of about seven notes
seem to work the best.
This writer hopes that the ideas in this
article will assist the choir director in constructing and administering tonal memory
tests that help identify students who possess
well-developed tonal-memory skills.
NOTES
1
Louis H Diercks, “A Prognostic Approach to the
Choral Auditions,” Choral Journal (November,
1962), 9–11.
2
Thomas Wine, “All-state Choruses: a Survey of
Practices, Procedures, and Perceptions,” Choral
Journal (1996, 36), 21–27.
3
Barbara A. Brinson, Choral Music Methods and
Materials (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Group,
1996), 34–36.
4
John B Hylton, Comprehensive Choral Music
Education (Upper Saddle River, NJ: PrenticeHall Inc., 1995), 38–39.
5
Kenneth H. Phillips, Directing the Choral Music
Program (New York, NY: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 62– 63.
6
Tony A. Mowrer, “Tonal Memory As An Audition
Factor for Choral Ensembles.” (Doctoral
Dissertation, Temple University, 1996).
7
Elizabeth Loftus, Memory (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1980).
8
George Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus
or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity
for Processing Information,” Psychological
Review (1956, 63), 81–97.
9
John Booth Davies, “Memory for Melodies and
Tonal Sequences: A Brief Note,” Bulletin for
the Council of Research in Music Education
(1981), 66–67.
10
Peggy Long, “Relationships Between Pitch
Memory in Short Melodies and Selected
Factors,” Journal of Research in Music
Education (1977, 25), 272– 82.
11
Jay W. Dowling, “Scale and Contour : Two
Components of a Theory of Memory for
Melodies,” Psychological Review (1978, 85),
341–54.
12
Randall G. Pembrook, “Interference of the
Transcription Process and Other Selected
Variables on Perception and Memory During
Melodic Dictation,” Journal of Research in
Music Education (1986, 34), 238–61.
13
Fred Attneave and Richard Olson, “Pitch As A
Medium: A New Approach To Psychophysical
Scaling,” The American Journal of Psychology
(1971, 84), 147– 66.
14
Lisa M. Korenman and Zehra F. Peynircioglu,
“Individual Differences in Learning and
Remembering Music: Auditory versus Visual
Presentation,” Journal of Research in Music
Education (2007, 55), 48 –64.
15
Diercks, 9–11.
16
Jean-Luc Dumont, “Magical Numbers: The SevenPlus-or-Minus-Two Myth,” IEEE Transactions
on Professional Communication (2002, 45),
123– 27.
Choral Journal • May 2010