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This study investigated adolescents' ability to identify melodies when extremely similar melodies are interpolated between the initial target melody and test melody. Participants from Argentina, Brazil and the United States listened to 16 initial melodies, each of which was followed by 8 extremely similar melodies in two presentation sets. Within each test trial, nine consecutive melodies were heard with the target melody in the first position. That same melody appeared again only once in one of the other eight recall positions. Each of the eight recall positions was tested twice within the 16 examples. Additionally, in the second presentation, the test melody also appeared in another recall position with meter and mode changes. Since all melodies in the study were extremely similar the study tested relative interference effects of passage of time and number of interpolated melodies between the original presentation of the target melody and its appearance in the set of test melodies. Results demonstrated that while there were differences across populations, young adolescents in each country are capable of remembering and discriminating among highly similar melodies. Implications for music education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]