Method

Participants. Twenty students from the University of Lyon participated in Experiment 2. Musical practice, as measured by years of instrumental instruction, varied from 0 to 10 years, with a mean of 1.8 (SD = 3.1) and a median of 0.

Material. The melody pairs of Experiment 1 were used, with the last tone being played in-tune or 35 cents higher¹². Eight additional melodies served as examples for the task.

Procedure. The experiment consisted of a training phase and an experimental phase. In the training phase, the concept of “out-of-tune” was explained to participants using a familiar French song (“J’ai du bon tabac”) that was played with its last tone in tune, then repeated with its last tone shifted in pitch by -35 and +35 cents. Participants were trained with eight sample melodies: they had to judge as quickly and as accurately as possible whether the last tone of each melody was in-tune or out-of-tune by pressing one of two keys on the computer keyboard. Response times were measured from the onset of the target tones. In the experimental phase, participants performed the same task with 48 melodies presented in pseudo-random orders. Pseudo-random orders were random orders with two constraints: the two melodies of a pair had to be separated by at least four melodies, and a given pitch deviation condition (in-tune, out-of-tune) was not repeated more than five times in succession. Participants received error feedback. A 250 ms noise mask followed each trial, and participants had to press a third key to proceed to the next trial.

Data Analysis. Percentages of correct responses and correct response times (averaged over the sequence set) were analyzed by two 2 x 2 ANOVAs, with Tonal Relatedness (tonic / subdominant) and Pitch Deviation (in-tune / out-of-tune) as within-participant factors. One participant was dropped from the analyses because of low accuracy (correct responses inferior to 55%). Data were screened for outlier response times (defined as response times that did not lie within four standard deviations from the mean): no outlier response times needed to be omitted.