Predictive Value of Narmour's Principles for Cohesiveness, Pleasingness, and Memory of Webern Melodies

Previous research has demonstrated that the perceived cohesiveness of an atonal rhythmically isochronous melody can be predicted by its adherence to certain "bottom-up" principles outlined in Narmour's (1990, 1991, 1992) Implication-Realization theory of melodic expectancy (Russo & Cuddy, 1995). The cohesiveness measure offers a new application of Narmour's principles. We refer to cohesiveness as a global property emerging from the total composite of notes in a melody, and thus distinct from local tone-to-tone expectancies examined in earlier studies (Cuddy & Lunney, 1995; Krumhansl, 1995; Thompson, Cuddy, & Plaus, 1996). The two experiments reported here applied the concept of principle adherence to predict listeners' judgments of cohesiveness and pleasingness of melodies and also listeners' memory for melodies. In an effort to increase ecological validity, real melodies composed by Anton Webern were selected as the stimulus contexts for both experiments.