Piano history, aural skills, and working memory predict melodic dictation performance

that received spoken instructions intended to focus their attention on specific elements. Williams (2022) reported that listeners were more successful detecting errors in three-part polyphonic music when the error was in the line on which they were instructed to focus, as compared to peripheral lines. Therefore, focus of attention seems to influence-positively or negativelylisteners' accuracy during melodic dictation and related tasks.Musical training and other background variables have been explored in relation to melodic dictation accuracy, with some mixed findings. Surprisingly, dictation accuracy was not affected by the number of years of prior music theory study and piano skill in one study (Beckett, 1997). In contrast, years of private piano lessons served as a significant positive predictor of melodic dictation scores among collegiate music majors (Nichols & Springer, 2022). Similarly, years of experience on a secondary instrument was a significant predictor of error detection skill (Nichols & Barrett, 2024). Finally, Stambaugh (2016) reported that grades received in aural skills class-but not music theory class-were associated with higher performance on a measure of error detection. Given that various types of musical training and experience are likely to covary with melodic dictation skills, it is important for researchers to explore those relationships in studies of melodic dictation.Cognitive factors associated with melodic dictation skill may include working memory capacity, phrase chunking, transcription ability, and the agency for selective attention (Cornelius & Brown, 2020). Related to this is the construct of mental imagery, which is the ability to imagine or picture ideas-whether visual or otherwise. For auditory imagery, the ability to imagine sounds when prompted may be important for musicians, which may be related to musical training (Gates, 2021;Halpern, 2015). Musical training seems relevant for working memory capacity, in which some types of musicians may show greater capacity than others. For example, jazz musicians outperformed classical musicians on a measure of working memory (Nichols et al., 2018), yet the role of auditory imagery in melodic dictation tasks remains unclear. Regarding the role of working memory, both verbal working memory and tonal working memory have been shown to be related to error detection performance in college musicians (Nichols & Barrett, 2024). This finding supports the potential implication of working memory in melodic dictation (Cornelius & Brown, 2020) if in fact the performance of error detection and melodic dictation performance are correlated (Larson, 1977).Attentional flexibility is the cognitive ability to switch between tasks or levels of focus, and there is evidence that musical training enhances this ability, both in children (Bain, 1976) and adults (Biasutti, 2017). A direct comparison showed college musicians to be superior to nonmusicians (Bugos & Mostafa, 2011), but there is also evidence that degree of training is not associated with a broader measure called cognitive flexibility (Gade & Schlemmer, 2021). There is evidence of a positive correlation between cognitive flexibility and sight reading ability (Herrero & Carriedo, 2022), and sight reading has also been shown to have an association with melodic dictation (Pembrook, 1986). Further, conductors have been shown to have superior skills than pianists on some, but not all, attentional flexibility tasks (Wöllner & Halpern, 2016).Therefore, musicians may rely on attentional flexibility to perform complex tasks such as transcribing both pitch and rhythms in a melodic dictation task. Ding et al. (2018) suggested that increased numbers of notes, but not the duration of notes, taxes working memory for musicians and non-musicians. Musicians outperformed nonmusicians in a test of verbal working memory but not in a test of tonal working memory in Ding et al.'s study, suggesting different mechanisms for tonal working memory than other types of working memory. Thus, measures of memory and attention in any study of musicians might incorporate multiple modalities. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of memory, attention, and musical background in melodic dictation. Two research questions guided the inquiry:1. To what extent are measures of memory and attention related to melodic dictation performance? Our hypothesis was that these would be significantly related based on prior studies in focus of attention and in error detection.2. How are prior musical experience and musical training related to melodic dictation performance? Our hypothesis was that background variables would be related to melodic dictation performance, and also that age or coursework completed would be related.We sampled from undergraduate music majors at a college of music in the southeastern United States that required four semesters of written music theory and four semesters of aural skills coursework for all music degrees. Although we initially collected data from 36 participants, two participants who were enrolled for longer than the typical degree program by two standard deviations were excluded from analysis for a resulting sample size of N = 34. We collected data from each participant individually in a research laboratory. A researcher or research assistant first administered a background questionnaire, which documented and confirmed status as a music major and continued with demographic questions related to participants' year in school and history of lessons and ensemble performance. After completing the demographic questionnaire, we screened the participants for absolute pitch.Measures of absolute pitch are common in research related to pitch perception or production abilities. Given that absolute pitch ability has been shown to be related to melodic dictation (Dooley & Deutsch, 2010), we administered a brief test of absolute pitch ability, which included ten tones using a pre-recorded sine tones ranging from F#3 to E5 (cf. Schlemmer et al., 2005).Between each of the ten items was a brief pause followed by dissonant clusters of notes performed with a piano timbre followed again by a brief pause before the next item. Participants continued in the subsequent data collection regardless of their performance on this test. Four participants' scores suggested absolute pitch ability. However, none of those participants' melodic dictation scores were outliers (all within 2 SD of the mean within the 95% rejection region), and none were the top scoring participants on melodic dictation. Therefore, we chose to retain these participants in our analyses, consistent with Nichols & Barrett (2024).Following the absolute pitch screening, participants completed a battery of tests related to attention and working memory, as well as a melodic dictation task. Each of these measures are described in the paragraphs that follow in the order they were completed by participants. Data collection took approximately 45 mins per participant, and participants took one rest break between tasks near the midpoint of the procedures.Verbal Working Memory. Next, participants completed two measures of working memory capacity, including a common measure of verbal working memory referred to as the forward digit span test (per Talamini et al., 2016). In this test, participants hear numbers at a rate of one digit per second and are asked to repeat the numbers verbally in the order they were presented. Participants advance in duration-increasing from sets of two numbers to sets of three numbers, and if they are successful, increasing to sets of four numbers, and so on. The participant's score is the number corresponding to the highest set of numbers they recite accurately, and the participant stops the test when they do not accurately recite a series of numbers within the set. Our participants' digit span scores ranged from 4 to 9 (M = 5.44, SD = 1.19, 95% CI 1 [5.09, 5.82]).Tonal Working Memory. The second working memory task was a test of tonal working memory in which participants hear pairs of pitch sequences of increasing length (Nichols & Barrett, 2024), modeled after the forward digit span task in which participants' working memory 1 All 95% confidence intervals reported in the paper are bootstrapped using 1,000 bootstrap samples.is tested with increasing series of digits to be remembered (Talamini et al., 2016). Pitch sequences were presented as eighth notes at 75 bpm, and in the second sequence of each pair, half the items were presented identically, and half were presented with one different pitch, minimizing large pitch leaps or non-chord tones. After hearing each pair, participants indicated whether the pitch sequences were same or different. As in the forward digit span test for verbal working memory, the tonal working memory test progressed in terms of stimuli length. We used a presentation of ten items of six monophonic pitches in sequence, and the order of items was randomized for each participant for this and subsequent levels of the test. Then we gave participants ten items of eight pitches, then ten items of ten pitches, concluding after ten items of twelve pitches. Unlike the forward digit span test, all participants progressed through all four levels of the test until the end. As used in Nichols and Barrett's (2024) study, the participants were scored by how many items (out of 40) they answered correctly. Among our sample, tonal working memory scores ranged from 21 to 33 (M = 28.24, SD = 3.28, 95% CI [27.15,29.21]).Auditory Imagery. We chose to include auditory imagery among our measures of memory and attention based on prior studies (Gates, 2021;Halpern, 2015). Auditory imagery is conceived of here as "hearing" a sound in one's head that is not physically present, and for this construct, we used the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS; Halpern, 2015). The BAIS is composed of two self-reporting subscales for Vividness (BAIS-V) and f

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