Relative influence of musical and linguistic experience on early cortical processing of pitch contours

To assess domain specificity of experience-dependent pitch representation we evaluated the mismatch negativity (MMN) and discrimination judgments of English musicians, English nonmusicians, and native Chinese for pitch contours presented in a nonspeech context using a passive oddball paradigm. Stimuli consisted of homologues of Mandarin high rising (T2) and high level (T1) tones, and a linear rising ramp (T2L). One condition involved a between-category contrast (T1/T2), the other, a within-category contrast (T2L/T2). Irrespective of condition, musicians and Chinese showed larger MMN responses than nonmusicians; Chinese larger than musicians. Chinese, however, were less accurate than nonnatives in overt discrimination of T2L and T2. Taken together, these findings suggest that experience-dependent effects to pitch contours are domain-general and not driven by linguistic categories. Yet specific differences in long-term experience in pitch processing between domains (music vs. language) may lead to gradations in cortical plasticity to pitch contours.     

Multiple coding strategies in the retention of musical tones by possessors of absolute pitch

Eighteen musicians with absolute pitch (AP) confirmed by screening tests participated in tonal and verbal short-term-retention tasks. In the tonal task, subjects identified three successive piano tones by their letter names. Recall of these note names after 18 sec of counting backwards was near perfect. Recall after an 18-sec delay filled with random piano tones was also near perfect. In contrast, the same subjects demonstrated significant forgetting when required to retain letter trigrams while counting backwards for 18 sec. These results were essentially replicated in a second experiment using longer (27 sec) retention intervals, a more demanding verbal interference task, and an active musical interference task (singing a descending scale). We interpret these results as indicating that retention of note names by possessors of AP is not limited to verbal encoding; rather, multiple codes (e.g., auditory, kinesthetic, and visual imagery) are probably used.     

The perceptual onset of musical tones

The perceptual onset of a musical tone can be defined as the moment in time at which the stimulus is first perceived. In the present experiments, a simple threshold model for the perceptual onset was applied. A paradigm was used in which a sequence of tones had to be adjusted in such a way that the onsets were perceived at equally spaced moments in time. In Experiment 1, the threshold model was applied in a design in which the rise times of the tones were varied. We concluded that the perceptual onsets of the tones can, indeed, be defined as the times at which the envelopes pass a relative threshold of 15 dB below the maximum level of the tones (82 dB). In Experiment 2, the maximum levels of the tones were varied from 37 to 77 dB. The results show that there is a shift in the relative threshold, but that this shift is small relative to the shift in the stimulus level. In Experiment 3, the effect of level above masked threshold on the perceptual onset was investigated in more detail by varying the level of a background noise. The results show that the relative threshold decreases with increasing level above masked threshold. The results from our experiments strongly suggest that the relative threshold is linearly dependent on the level above masked or absolute threshold and that a 7-dB increment of this level results in a 1-dB relative threshold decrement. The threshold model is compared with a current temporal integration model for the perceptual onset of tones. It is shown that our data cannot be adequately explained by temporal integration. Our experimental results suggest that adaptation of the hearing mechanism to a certain relative stimulus level is responsible for perceptual onset. The applicability of our threshold model in various realistic musical situations is discussed.     

声调范畴感知和声调复杂度对音乐音高感知的跨领域影响

采用音高识别与区分任务, 以汉语母语者、越南语母语者和俄语母语者为研究对象, 考察了两个语言加工层面的因素, 即声调范畴感知模式以及不同语言声调系统的复杂度差异对跨领域音乐音高感知的影响。结果发现: (1)汉语和越南语两组声调语言母语者听辨结果符合范畴感知模式, 而俄语母语者是连续感知。在语言和音乐两种刺激条件下, 声调语言母语者在范畴边界宽度、范畴内区分率、范畴间区分率以及区分峰度等指标上不存在显著差异。(2)汉语和越南语两组声调语言母语者的音乐音高区分任务结果差异不显著。实验结果表明: 在行为层面, 母语声调范畴感知模式可以迁移到音乐音高感知中, 但复杂声调系统并不能促进跨领域的音乐音高精细感知。实验结果从语言对音乐音高加工影响的角度支持了“共享论”。     

The influence of linguistic experience on the cognitive processing of pitch in speech and nonspeech sounds

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a pitch discrimination task requiring fine-grained discrimination of simple nonspeech sounds. The crucial finding was that cross-language differences emerged on a nonspeech pitch contour identification task: The Mandarin listeners more often misidentified flat and falling pitch contours than the English listeners in a manner that could be related to specific features of the sound structure of Mandarin, which suggests that the effect of linguistic experience extends to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task conditions.     

Circularity in relative pitch judgments for inharmonic complex tones: The Shepard demonstration revisited,again

The Shepard illusion, in which the presentation of a cyclically repetitive sequence of complex tones composed of partials separated by octave intervals (Shepard, 1964) gives the illusion of an endlessly increasing sequence of pitch steps, is often cited as evidence for octave equivalence. In this paper, evidence is presented which demonstrates that this illusion can be produced using (inharmonic) complex tones whose partials are separated by equal ratios other than octaves. Therefore, the illusion is not evidence for octave equivalence.     

Infants' perception of timbre: classification of complex tones by spectral structure

Infants 7 to 8.5 months of age were tested for their discrimination of timbre or sound quality differences in the context of variable exemplars. They were familiarized with a set of complex tones with specified spectral structure; members of the set varied in fundamental frequency, intensity, or duration. Infants were then tested for their detection of tones that contrasted in spectral structure but were similar in other respects. They successfully differentiated the two spectral structures in the context of these variations, indicating that they can classify tonal stimuli on the basis of timbre. When the stimuli were organized into arbitrary categories, infants were unable to differentiate these categories, indicating that their performance with nonarbitrary categories was not attributable to memorization of the familiarized set.     

The psychological representation of musical pitch in a tonal context

In this series of experiments, evidence was found for a complex psychological representation of musical pitch. The results of a scaling study, in which subjects judged the similarities between pairs of tones presented in an explicitly tonal context, suggest that musical listeners extract a pattern of relationships among tones that is determined not only by pitch height and chroma, but also by membership in the major triad chord and the diatonic scale associated with the tonal system of the context. Multidimensional scaling of the similarity ratings gave a three-dimensional conical structure around which the tones were ordered according to pitch height. The major triad components formed a closely related cluster near the vertex of the cone; the remaining diatonic scale tones formed a less closely related subset farther from the vertex; and, the nondiatonic tones, still farther from the vertex, were widely dispersed. The results also suggest that, in the psychological representation, tones less closely related to the tonality are less stable than tones closely related to the tonality, and that the representation incorporates the tendency for unstable tones to move toward the more stable tones in time, reflecting the dynamic character of musical tones. In the similarity ratings of the scaling study, tones less related to the tonality were judged more similar to tones more related to the tonality than the reverse temporal order. Furthermore, in a delayed recognition task memory performance for nondiatonic tones was less accurate than for diatonic tones, and nondiatonic tones were more often confused with diatonic tones than diatonic tones were confused with nondiatonic tones. These results indicate the tonality-specific nature of the psychological representation and argue that the perception of music depends not only on psychoacoustic properties of the tones, but also on processes that relate the tones to one another through contact with a well-defined and complex psychological representation of musical pitch.     

Cross-octave masking of single tones and musical sequences: The effects of structure on auditory recognition

A series of experiments explored the role of structural information in the auditory recognition process, within the context of a backward recognition masking paradigm. A masking tone presented after a test tone has been found to interfere with the perceptual processing of the test tone, the degree of interference decreasing with increased durations of the silent intertone interval between the test and masking tones. In the current studies, the task was modified to utilize three-tone sequences as the test stimuli. Six test sequences were employed (LMH, LHM, MLH, MHL, HLM, HML), where L, M, and H represent the lowest, middle, and highest frequencies in the melody. The observers identified these six possible sequences when the three tones of the test sequence were interleaved with three presentations of a single masking tone. All three tones of the test sequence were drawn from the same octave, while the masking tones could be drawn from any of three octaves, symmetrical around the octave containing the test tones. Under these conditions, interference occurred primarily from masking tones drawn from the same octave as the test tones. Masking tones drawn from other octaves were found to produce little, if any, interference with perception of the test tones. This effect was found to occur only for the identification of tonal sequences. Substantial masking of single-tone targets occurred with masking tones drawn from octaves other than that containing the targets. The results make apparent the use of structural information during auditory recognition. A theoretical interpretation was advanced which suggests that, while single tones are perceived on the basis of absolute pitch, the presence of auditory structure may allow relational information, such as exact pitch intervals or melodic contour, to facilitate perception of the tonal sequence.     

The role of pitch and temporal diversity in the perception and production of musical sequences

In two experiments we explored how the dimensions of pitch and time contribute to the perception and production of musical sequences. We tested how dimensional diversity (the number of unique categories in each dimension) affects how pitch and time combine. In Experiment 1, 18 musically trained participants rated the complexity of sequences varying only in their diversity in pitch or time; a separate group of 18 pianists reproduced these sequences after listening to them without practice. Overall, sequences with more diversity were perceived as more complex, but pitch diversity influenced ratings more strongly than temporal diversity. Further, although participants perceived sequences with high levels of pitch diversity as more complex, errors were more common in the sequences with higher diversity in time. Sequences in Experiment 2 exhibited diversity in both pitch and time; diversity levels were a subset of those tested in Experiment 1. Again diversity affected complexity ratings and errors, but there were no statistical interactions between dimensions. Nonetheless, pitch diversity was the primary factor in determining perceived complexity, and again temporal errors occurred more often than pitch errors. Additionally, diversity in one dimension influenced error rates in the other dimension in that both error types were more frequent relative to Experiment 1. These results suggest that although pitch and time do not interact directly, they are nevertheless not processed in an informationally encapsulated manner. The findings also align with a dimensional salience hypothesis, in which pitch is prioritised in the processing of typical Western musical sequences.     

Recognition memory for pitch of fixed and roving stimulus tones

The method of delayed comparison was used to measure pitch memory under two conditions of presentation, either the same standard tone on every trial (fixed S) or one of four equally likely standard tones (roving S), six durations of interference interval ranging from 0.0 to 4.0 sec, and two types of interference interval, either blank or filled with a pure tone. Listeners were instructed not to rehearse the S tone during the interference interval. For both fixed-S and roving-S conditions, accuracy of performance, as measured by area under the ROC curve, declined as interval duration increased and declined more rapidly following an interference-filled than following a blank interval. In general, forgetting proceeded at a slower rate under fixed-S conditions than under roving-S conditions. A second experiment showed that very little forgetting is obtained over 4 sec for roving-S conditions if instructions permit rehearsal of the S tone and suggests that the conclusions from the first experiment be restricted to nonrehearsal instructional conditions.     

Independent temporal and pitch structures in determination of musical phrases

In two experiments we addressed the roles of temporal and pitch structures in judgments of melodic phrases. Musical excerpts were rated on how good or complete a phrase they made. In Experiment 1, trials in the temporal condition retained the original temporal pattern but were equitonal; trials in the pitch condition retained the original pitch pattern but were equitemporal; and trials in the melody condition contained both temporal and pitch patterns. In Experiment 2, one pattern (pitch or temporal) was shifted in phase and recombined with the other pattern to create the pitch and temporal conditions. In the melody condition, both patterns were shifted together. In both experiments, ratings in the temporal and pitch conditions were uncorrelated, and the melody condition ratings were accurately predicted by a linear combination of the pitch and temporal condition ratings. These results were consistent across musicians with varying levels of experience.     

Effects of harmonics on relative pitch discrimination in a musical context

The contribution of different harmonics to pitch salience in a musical context was examined by requiring subjects to discriminate a small (1/4 semitone) pitch change in one note of a melody that repeated in transposition. In Experiment 1, performance was superior when more harmonics were present (first five vs. fundamental alone) and when the second harmonic (of tones consisting of the first two harmonics) was in tune compared with when it was out of tune. In Experiment 2, the effects of harmonics 6 and 8, which stand in octave-equivalent simple ratios to the fundamental (2∶3 and 1∶2, respectively) were compared with harmonics 5 and 7, which stand in more complex ratios (4:5 and 4:7, respectively). When the harmonics fused into a single percept (tones consisting of harmonics 1, 2, and one of 5, 6, 7, or 8), performance was higher when harmonics 6 or 8 were present than when harmonics 5 or 7 were present. When the harmonics did not fuse into a single percept (tones consisting of the fundamental and one of 5, 6, 7, or 8), there was no effect of ratio simplicity.     

The influence of music-elicited emotions and relative pitch on absolute pitch memory for familiar melodies

Levitin's findings that nonmusicians could produce from memory the absolute pitches of self-selected pop songs have been widely cited in the music psychology literature. These findings suggest that latent absolute pitch (AP) memory may be a more widespread trait within the population than traditional AP labelling ability. However, it has been left unclear what factors may facilitate absolute pitch retention for familiar pieces of music. The aim of the present paper was to investigate factors that may contribute to latent AP memory using Levitin's sung production paradigm for AP memory and comparing results to the outcomes of a pitch labelling task, a relative pitch memory test, measures of music-induced emotions, and various measures of participants' musical backgrounds. Our results suggest that relative pitch memory and the quality and degree of music-elicited emotions impact on latent AP memory.