Effects of musical acculturation: Learning, reproducing, and recalling music from different cultural traditions.

Different cultural systems and needs produce different musical structures. Each music is an adaptive answer to the demands of a particular environment, activity, or group. In which ways the acculturation to a particular kind of music can affect the fruition and ‘understanding’ of other kinds of music (see Walker, 1996), is a focal topic in music cognition. The present paper investigates how active and passive musical acculturation can influence reproduction and recall of music from other cultures. 24 Ss, half professional musicians, half naïve listeners, were invited individually to learn, reproduce and recall three excerpts of songs from three different cultures, unknown to them (Gaelic, Romanian, and Chinese). The songs were selected on the basis of their rhythmic and melodic features, which had different degrees of similarity to Western music. Ss were invited to freely learn the songs in order to reproduce them singing, with the highest fidelity to the model. After a retention interval of approximately 60 mins, they were invited to sing them again. The results showed a clear difference between the learning style of the musicians and that of the naïves. The professional musicians reproduced and recalled more accurately the melody of the excerpts closer to familiar music. The Chinese excerpt, which was melodically and structurally very distant from Western music, was poorly reproduced by all the Ss, independently from their level of expertise. These results confirm the finding about meter structures obtained in a previous analysis (Brunetti & Olivetti Belardinelli, 2003). It is possible to conclude that acculturation to the music of a particular culture seems to impair the reproduction and recall of music from other cultures. Theoretical implications are discussed, in order to integrate the results within the concept of musical expertise and the possibility of ‘understanding’ music from other cultures.