Questioning a melodic archetype:
Do listeners use gap-fill to classify melodies?

Meyer (1973) argued that listeners' experience of melodies is shaped by certain melodic "archetypes." Among these archetypes is "gap-fill," a name for melodies in which an early skip is followed by some of the pitches that have been skipped over. In experiments conducted with Rosner, Meyer sought to show that the gap-fill archetype can help explain the ways that listeners compare and classify melodies (Rosner & Meyer, 1982, 1986). Reanalyses of the experimental results, however, suggest that gap-fill played little or no role. Together with an earlier study suggesting that gap-fill has no effect on melodic shape (von Hippel & Huron, 2000), these reanalyses weaken the claim that gap-fill is an important concept for classifying melodies.

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