Experiment 1

Experiment 1 adapted the musical priming paradigm to melodies, which were constructed by pairs as described above and were played by piano tones. Before conducting the priming experiment, a pretest with completion judgments aimed to confirm that the single note change in the melodic pairs was sufficient to elicit different perceptions in related and less-related conditions. The priming experiment then investigated target tone processing with a timbre identification task. Participants had to judge whether the target tone was played by one of two timbres (referred to as Timbre A and Timbre B). Based on previously reported harmonic priming data (Tillmann et al., 2000; 2006), faster processing was predicted for related than for less-related target tones.