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.