Listener and musical factors influence the identification of songs from
chord progressions. Having played and being able to write out the chords of
the target song from long-term memory (hereafter, specialized harmonic
familiarity) facilitate the identification of jazz standards from their
chord progressions among Jazz musicians (Jimenez & Kuusi, 2018b).
Additionally, identifying popular songs and pieces of classical music from
chord progressions is easier when stimuli are played using piano tones as
opposed to Shepard tones, an effect that may be at least partially driven
by the melodic ambiguity that Shepard tones create (Jimenez & Kuusi,
2018a). The present study investigated whether similar and additional
effects can be observed under different experimental conditions. Adopting a
gating paradigm, this new study tested the ability of 303 Beatles fans to
identify four well-known Beatles songs from chord progressions played using
piano tones. Results confirmed previous findings regarding the effect of
melodic cues. We also found some effect of specialized harmonic similarity
and transposition but only for the songs that were easiest to identify. A
possible explanation for this is that participants who are particularly
familiar with a song and its harmony have an easier access to, and higher
likelihood of using top-down identification strategies such as singing the
melody on top of the chords or recollecting the chord labels of the song
and that close transposition and extra-harmonic similarity between stimuli
and original can facilitate the success of such top-down strategies.