Global matching in music familiarity: How musical features combine across memory traces to increase familiarity with the whole in which they are embedded

Abstract Across three experiments, the present study tested specific hypotheses regarding how the encoding of different isolated musical feature-types (rhythm and pitch) affects perceived familiarity with later piano song clips in which those features are embedded. The results are broadly consistent with global matching approaches to the computation of the familiarity signal for a musical piece. Further, the results suggest that during the global matching process, the feature-match assessments of separately encoded instances of isolated rhythm and isolated pitch information combine additively across memory traces to increase the familiarity of the test song clip in which they are embedded. As we show through simulations, this additive combination of feature-match levels across memory traces adheres to an assumption present in the MINERVA 2 model of familiarity signal computation.