Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1962, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1960, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1896, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Music

Music perception is influenced by implicit knowledge of musical structures acquired through exposure to music in everyday contexts. The present studied focused on the ways in which music environments provide infants with information about how music is organized and from which they might learn. A 15-month-old infant wore a portable recording device throughout two entire days. The device collected continuous audio data from the infant's perspective for a total of 32 hours. The purpose of the study was to describe the song melodies performed by adults throughout the two days in order to explore the music information presented to the infant in everyday situations in his natural environment. The analyses focused specifically on the structural pitch properties of the song melodies, the contexts in which they were sung, and the characteristics of the song performances. All live, unaccompanied song melodies performed by the parents—the only adults who sang song melodies around the infant—were transcribed into musical notation by two independent transcribers and then analyzed with acoustic analysis software to collect pitch estimates for all notes that were sung. The results showed that the infant heard approximately 15 minutes of adult singing of song melodies on the first day and 10.5 minutes on the second day. Almost 89% of the singing was produced by the parents in infant-oriented contexts, in which the infant was the sole focus of the singing. Over the two days, the infant heard 27 unique song melodies in 47 different instances of singing. Of the 27 unique song melodies, 19 were melodies of repertoire that is usually sung for or sung by children in the family's culture group. The song melodies heard by the infant contained pitch regularities that reflected typical patterns of pitch structures in Western tonal music. For example, the frequency of occurrence of tones perceived as most stable—scale degrees 1, 3, and 5—and the frequency of melodic movements between to (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Eugenia Costa-Giomi (Advisor); Daryl Kinney (Committee Member); Daniel Shanahan (Committee Member) Subjects: Developmental Psychology; Music; Music Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1985, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1980, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Health Sciences

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2015, Hearing Science (Health Sciences and Professions)

The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of structured musical training on various auditory and memory processes in persons with normal hearing, attention, and memory function at various stages of training and maturation. It is known that musical training influences cortical sound processing through learning-based processes, but also at the preattentive level within the brainstem. Such training strengthens processes in the auditory and motor domains, as well as central processes. This study investigated auditory memory abilities in individuals placed within high and low musical training categories using nonverbal auditory stimuli within listening tasks that stressed attention. Use of nonverbal sounds provided a control for performance characteristics influenced by linguistic knowledge while establishing whether musical training enhances a listener's ability to assemble incoming sound information into an accurate and meaningful mental representation of one's environment. Three experiments measuring auditory working memory capacity, the interplay between frequency discrimination and memory capacity, and pitch matching retention were evaluated. Three different age groups of children and a group of young adults, each split into subgroups based on musical training, participated. The outcomes indicate that both musical training and age influence performance for pitch perception, organization and memory tasks with adult-like performance identified by age 14.

Committee: Jeffrey DiGiovanni (Committee Chair); Dennis Ries (Committee Member); James Montgomery (Committee Member); Kamile Geist (Committee Member) Subjects: Audiology; Cognitive Psychology; Neurosciences