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To determine the nature of a melody at least four features are required: melodic contour, interval size, the order of form parts, as well as the underlying harmonic framework. However most definitions of melody do not adhere to structural details but also consider the perceptual side. Deliège suggests a selection mechanism called "cue abstraction' that enables us to extract the most obvious features immediately from music texture. Riemann (1877) sets the focus on processes of the active mind. He coined the term "Beziehendes Denken' ("relational thinking') to describe a flexible listening style of setting parts of a melody in relation to each other in order to create coherence between elements. Can we grasp "relational thinking' by experiment? What are the results? We approached this issue the first time from the neurocognitive side using the eight-bar "musical period' in two form type variants, AABB and ABAB. The event-related potentials reveal that non-musicians' brains exclusively detect the structural features of a melody, i.e. pattern similarity (e.g. A-A, B-B, or A-B-A) on the basis of rhythmical sameness while an ERP component, called anterior N300, shows the amount of mental effort required to identify this congruence. However no neural correlate of mental processes related to "Beziehendes Denken' could be found suggesting that relational thinking is measurable only in retrospect. Obviously we need a complete perceptual unit to evaluate the coherence of form parts. The chapter closes with some general remarks on structural hearing as well as on "listening grammar' versus "compositional grammar'.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00107-4_8

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