Music consists of five main components: rhythm, volume, pitch, teimber, and harmony; it has been demonstrated that musical melodies are broken into smaller segments based upon cues on the surface of the tunes, such as the contour, rhythm, and tempo of the music, that impress themselves upon the brain (Deliege, 2001; Koniari, Predazzer, & Melen, 2001; and Melen & Waschmann, 2001). Epstein (1987) suggested that the basic shape of a melody - its patterns of intervals between notes - is not dependent upon the pitches of the notes, and Shoenberg (1975) further proposed that "the motif is an interval and rhythmic pattern combined to produce an easily memorable shape, and comprehension of this shape forms the basis for the perception of musical coherence." A number of researchers (Ramscar & Hann, 1998; Lamont & Dibben, 2001; Jackendorff, 1987; and DeBellis, 1999) have speculated that lyrics may provide a context within which the musical notes and contour of a simple motif are more memorable, and thereby solidify subjects' mememory of particular sequences of notes.
Though some studies have proven that people tend to pay more attention to, and recall more accurately, stimuli that are presented alone (Cherry, 1953; and Neisser & Becklen, 1975), it is also true that, if the brain utilizes different cognitive processes to attend and respond to simultaneous stimuli, memory is not therefore impaired, because the messages can be attended to without competition for neurological resources (Hirst & Kalmar, 1987). According to various threads of research (Klimesch, Pfurtscheller, & Schimke, 1992; Pfurtscheller & Maresch, 1988; and Pfurtscheller & Klimesch, 1992a; 1992b), although gross cortical activity remains constant during the presentation of these two types of stimuli, event-related desyncronization (ERD) occurs between ten and twelve Hertz in the alpha-band in response to hearing or memorizing spoken words (Pfurtscheller, 1997; and Krause, Phorn, Lang, & Laine, 1997), but event-related synchronization (ERS), an increase in the same range of alpha-band power, is triggered by a response to the reverse text (Pfurtscheller et al.,1992; and Krause et al., 1997). Moreover, Petsche, Linder, Rappelsberger, and Gruber (1997) observed a significant decrease in overall alpha-band power while subjects listened to music.
Music memorization has been the topic of extensive research (Goodglass & Calderon, 1977; Bonnel, Faita, Peretz, and Bessan, 1996; and Bonnel & Requin, 2000). Though a number of studies have proven that the perceptual processes required for musical and speech stimuli are related, Goodglass and Celderon (1977) noticed that different areas f the brian are engaged in remembering words and digits associated with melodies; evidence has been documented that suggests that lyrics and melody may, however, be combined in memory processes (Serafine, Crowder, & Rapp, 1984a; 1986b; and Calderon, Serafine, & Rapp, 1990). Boyle and Coltheart (1996) discovered that irrelevant words exerted a negative effect on melodic memory, perhaps because irrelevant speech and/or music interferes with short-term memory processes because the sounds are stored in a phonologica loop, thereby displacing other short-term memories that have been stored in it (Boddeley & Hitch, 1974; and Baddeley, 1986). However, a number of other independent studies have suggested that auditory tones do not generally impair short-term memory of words, phrases, and sentences (Jones, 1993; Morris, Jones, & Quayle, 1989; and Salame & Baddeley, 1982). Bigand, McAdams, and Foret (2000) suggest that the nature of musical cognition may be such that the aforementioned attentional problems that plague other areas of perception may be resolved via a unique neurological mechanism or mechanisms.
While the present study does not undertake to analyze the structural and/or mechanical details of musical perception and memory that have been suggested by qualified experts in the field, we proposed to compare the effects of meaningful words versus nonsense words on subjects' accuracy of melodic recall. This experiment, which alternates simple tunes without words and simple tunes with words that make sense, and tunes with nonsensical lyrics, studies the advantages and disadvantages of lyrics on memorization of motifs when the accompanying lyrics are familiar to participants, and when they are not.
Methods. The subjects of our research were twenty college age-male and female volunteers, chosen at random, with varying levels of musical familiarity and training; twelve were women, and eight were men. All subjects were able to match pitch and vocally recreate simple melodic phrases.Using the MIDI Digital Performer Software (2000) run on a Macintosh computer, we composed a series of nine short melodies. Three well-known nursery rhymes were chosen to accompany these tunes: "Hey, Diddle, Diddle" was set to a tune of eleven notes in the key of C and in three-quarter time; this was recorded in the software as simultaneous vocal and instrumental (piano) tracks. Another melody following the same pattern, with the same time and key signatures was recorded with and without lyrics, and a third motif, following the same musical pattern, was recorded with vocal lyrics created by writing the nursery rhyme backwards. This same cycle of three songs per musical pattern was maintained for "Little Bo Peep," consisting of nine notes written in the key of F in three-quarter time, and for "Humpty Dumpty," which was accompanied by eight notes in the key of G in six-eight time. A Sony minidisc digital recorder was used to document each participant's testing session. The stimuli were run through a Sony soundboard volume and acoustic control panels, and Mitsubishi output ports.
Subjects entered the laboratory individually, and were presented with one melody at a time, each of which was played three times in its entirety. At the end of the third playback, the starting note of the melody was replayed, and the subject was asked to hum, whistle, or sing the melody to the best of his or her ability. This process was repeated for each of the three melodies of the same rhythm and key. At the end of each cylce of three tunes, a conversation was initiated concerning the first cycle in order to allow the participant to clear his or her head of the melodies from the it and focus on the next cycle of melodies. The recordings of the sessions were transcribed by ear, and subjects' data consists of ratios, based upon these transcriptions, of the number of the notes they produced correctly for each melody to the total number of notes in the tune.
Results. The data support the authors' hypothesis that subjects recalled most accurately the melodies that were accompanied by meaningful lyrics; participants' recall and reproductions of unaccompanied melodies were less accurate than those stimuli, but more accurate than that of their recreation of the tunes to which the reversed nursery rhymes had been set. Compared to their performance on the musical motifs alone, subjects showed an average increase of 8.10% in the accuracy of their vocal reproductions of the musical/lyrical stimuli when the regular (forwards) lyrics were added to the tunes; their scores decreased by an average of 13.10% when the music was accompanied by the reversed nursery rhymes. Two-sample t - tests were run to determine the significance of these differences in scores (see Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1). For Stimulus Set I - "Hey, Diddle, Diddle" - the difference between subjects' percentile scores for the tune with regular words, and for the tune with no words was 9.54% ( t(39) = 1.430; p = 0.0805); the difference between subjects' percentile scores for the tune with the reversed words and the tune with no words was 21.85 percentage points ( t(39) = -3.156; p = 0.001580), with the latter score much higher on the average; and the difference between their percentile scores for the tune with reversed words and the tune with the words in proper order was 31.39 percentage points ( t(39) = -4.37; p = 4.667 x 10 ^-5), where the subjects scored much more accurately when the tune was accompanied by the regular lyrics. For Stimulus Set II - "Little Bo Peep" - the difference between subjects' percentile scores for the tune with the regular rhyme, and the tune with no words at all, was 15% ( t (39) = 3.111; p = 0.002264); the difference between their scores for the tune with the reversed words, and the tune alone was 10% ( t (39) = -1.537; p = 0.0663); and the difference between subjects' average scores for the melody with regular words and for the melody with reversed words was 25% ( t (39) = -4.881; p = 1.000). For Stimulus Set III - "Humpty Dumpty" - the difference bettween subjects' percentile scores for the melody with regular words and with no words was 0.63% ( t (39) = -0.2843; p = 0.6109), slightly favoring the music alone; the differences between their percentile scores for the tune with reversed words and for the music by itself was 5.63% ( t (39) = -1.224; p = 0.1172), again with the latter score higher; and the average difference in their percentile scores for the tune with the reversed words and with the words in forward order was 5% ( t (39) = -1.024; p = 0.1577), favoring the melody with the words in their proper order.
Discussion. The data collected from the present study supports the hypothesis that the subjects' melodic memory is improved by the addition of sensible words, but impaired by the addition of nonsense words and/or phrases. For longer tunes (Stimulus Set I = eleven quarter notes), this difference is more significant, whereas for shorter musical sequences (e.g., Stimulus Set III = eight quarter notes), there was no average difference between subjects' accuracy scores for music alone and music accompanied by the regular nursery rhyme words. Subjects also earned higher overall accuracy scores for the shorter stimuli, probably because they were more easily remembered because they contained less information to be memorized. However, for all three experimental conditions, subjects' average percentile scores decreased in the same pattern (music with words was highest, and music with nonsense words was lowest), with the exception of Set III, in which subjects scored equally well (97.5% average) in the "music alone" and "music with regular words" conditions.
Our results seem to support that irrelevant words do interfere with people's attention to and memory of simple melodies, and this indicates that music and speech may be processed by very similar (if not overlapping) neurological mechanisms and/or circuits. However, they may support the "chunking" hypothesis, which proposes that people group stimuli into smaller meaningful segments in order to remember them more accurately, as well as the notion that sensible words may serve as a sort of context which facilitates subjects' memory of the tune to which they are set. In addition, they conform to the "five, plus or minus two" rule of memory, because as tunes became increasingly longer than seven notes, the accuracy of subjects' recall of them dropped, and the words' effects were mor pronounced. Hence, our results implicate the existence of an interaction effect between the addition of lyrics to music and the length of the motif itslef, on subjects' ability to accurately recall and reproduce simple melodies.
More extensive research on this topic should probably involve testing subjects' memory of music that is accompanied by nonsense syllables rather than simply nonsense words, and may experiment with motifs of varying length. Moreover, it would probably be illuminating to include a greater number and variety of subjects, and to examine the possible interaction of right- or left-brain dominance in the effects of these variables.
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