Key membership and implied harmony in Western tonal music: Developmental perspectives

We investigated the role of key membership and implied harmony in adults ' and children's perception oftone sequences. Listeners were evaluated on their ability to defect three types of changes in one note of a well-structured Western tonal melody. In one change (out-0f-key) the new note was not in the basis key, in another (out-of-harmony) it was in the key lout not in the implies harmony, and in the third(within-harmony) it was in both the key and the implied har-mony. Adults and 7-year-olds performed better on the out-of-key and out-of-harmony changes than on the within-harmony change, reflecting their implicit knowledge of key membership and im-plied harmony. Five-year-olds performed better an the out-of-key change than on the other two changes, reflecting the influence ofkey membership but not implied harmony. We consider the developmental precedence of key membership over implied harmony in the context ofcross-cultural and theoretical perspectives. Western listeners, including those who are musically untrained, process melodies according to music-theoreti