ABSTRACT
Since 1958, R.Francès in his book La perception de la musique, has shown the type of difficulty the listener is confronted with when listening to serial music. In a preliminary experiment pertaining to memory for short sequences of sounds, it appears that atonal
sequences are a lot less stable in immediate memory than tonal sequences, this being as much the case for subjects who are musicians as for non-musicians. The outcome of this experiment leads us to interpret the results as reflecting a structural instability of atonal melodies as compared with tonal melodies: in fact, the experiment consists of the detection of a change of note within an initial melody during its reproduction. The change is even easier to detect when it results in a modification of the overall form, or at least the network of relationships between the surrounding intervals. However, in atonal melodies, the network is too weakly organised, and changing the notes does not affect the form of the sequence, which itself has a hazy and imprecise form in the subjects’ perception, since scalar functions have completely disappeared and all the notes bear equivalent weight in the temporal flow.
