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Infant Music Perception For the past two years, we have been conducting a series of studies examining the ability of 7- and 11-month-old infants to categorize music on the basis of melody (the pattern of notes and relationships between them) and timbre (sound quality, or musical instrument, i.e., trumpet vs. piano). We are attempting to draw parallels between infant music processing and infant speech processing. This study, like all studies in our lab, requires a brief one-time visit to our lab. The total time for participation is about 20 minutes, which includes a brief interview and explanation of the study as well as the actual experiment. During the experiment, your infant would be seated on your lap facing a computer monitor. The monitor displays a picture of Mozart as classical music melodies play over the speakers. As long as your infant looks at the monitor, the music will continue to play. However, whenever your infant looks away from the monitor for more than one second, the music stops, and the next melody will play once your infant looks back at the monitor. This allows your infant to control how long he or she listens to each melody, which tells us how interested he or she is in that melody. Once your infant has become familiar with the initial melody or set of melodies, we play several different melodies that have changes in certain features (melody, timbre, or both) in order to determine the infant's interest in the new melodies. Related Conference Presentations:
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