The influence of musical relatedness on timbre discrimination

Musical priming research has reported that sensory consonance/dissonance judgements for a target chord were faster when targets were musically related to a musical prime context. The present study extended this context effect to a timbre discrimination task. This new task allowed us to investigate whether musical priming results from congruency effects similar to those reported in other domains. Targets were played with two musical timbres and were either strongly related (i.e., tonic chord) or less related (i.e., subdominant chord) to the prime context. In three experiments, timbre discrimination judgements were always faster for related targets than for less-related targets. This finding establishes that musical relatedness influences the processing of timbres and suggests that this priming effect does not derive from response biases due to congruency effects. Using a timbre discrimination task in musical priming studies offers other methodological advantages and controls, which are discussed in the final section.