The Effect of Context on Sightsinging.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to compare college students' ability to sightsing tonal melodies in two contexts: with and without a tonal harmonic accompaniment. The rationale for sightsinging with a tonal harmonic accompaniment is based on two premises: (a) sightsinging in a tonal harmonic context is more akin to the tasks that choral students encounter in a choral setting and (b) recent research in music perception and cognition, processes that appear to underlie sightsinging skills, suggests that melodic expectations are a reflection of previous experiences with music based on a tonal harmonic framework. Subjects were 30 undergraduate music students who represented three levels of training. A two-factor repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant main effect difference among the sightsinging performance scores of the three subgroups. The comparison of the total group's accompanied and unaccompanied sightsinging performance also yielded a statistically significant main effect.