Syntactic Processing Of Chinese Pentatonic Melody And The Influence Of Music Training On It

This study aims to explore the syntactic processing of Chinese pentatonic melody and the influence of professional music training on it.Behavioral experiment method based on priming effect was mainly adopted.The subjects of the experiment were both music and non-music major college students.Pentatonic national songs of Lingnan Han nationality were used as the music material for experimental stimuli.In the first part,two experiments were conducted to explore the perception of the stability of scale-step in pentatonic mode and that of the modulation in a system of different gong within a paragraph,respectively.The results showed that both groups of college students could perceive the three levels of stability of scale-step in pentatonic mode,and their perception of modulation was weaker to a closely related key but stronger to a distant key.In the second part,another two experiments were conducted to explore the influence of pitch and time factors in the simply syntactic processing of pentatonic melody,examining the effects of modal and rhythmic structure,as well as pure pitch and time value on syntactic perception,respectively.As a result,both groups of college students scored better on the original version of the national songs with a more stable modal structure and a more regular rhythm,and the "offending" version with rhythmic irregularities also had a certain degree of acceptance.The accuracy of phrase division in the pure rhythm version of experimental stimuli was much higher than that of the pure pitch version,and even higher than that of the original version,suggesting that the influence of time factor on the perception of melodic phrase pattern is greater than the pitch factor.In general,Chinese college students widely have basic syntactic processing ability for pentatonic melody.The positive impact of professional music training is reflected in the better perceptual acuity of scale-step stability,modulation in melodies,modal and rhythmic structure in music,and the accuracy of phrase division in regular paragraph.The study of syntactic processing reveals several syntactic characteristics of Chinese pentatonic melodies,such as the stable center of the modal system is not as absolute as the tonal system,and the rhythmic structure of the melody is relatively flexible.It can form a certain degree of empirical support for the existing related theories,but this is only an unformed beginning and further development of the study is expected.