Non score-dependency: theory and assessment

Untrained listeners demonstrate implicit knowledge of syntactic patterns and principles. Untrained generative music ability, for example singing, humming, and whistling, is a largely unconscious or intuitive application of these patterns and principles. From the viewpoint of embodied cognition, listening to music should evoke an internal representation or motor image which, together with the perception of organized music, should form the basis of musical cognition. Indeed, that is what listeners demonstrate when they sing, hum, or whistle familiar and unfamiliar tunes or when they vocally or orally improvise continuations to interrupted phrases. Research on vocal improvisation using continuations sung to an interrupted musical phrase, has shown that one’s cultural background influences the music generated. That should be the case for instrumentalists as well: when they play familiar or unfamiliar tunes by ear in different keys (transposition) or when they improvise variations, accompaniments, or continuations to interrupted phrases, the music they generate should reflect the same cognitive structures as their oral improvisations. This study is attempting to validate a test of (non) scoredependency that will enable assessment of the music student’s implicit knowledge of these structures during performance on the principal instrument