Octave generalization of specific interference effects in memory for tonal pitch

An experiment is described which demonstrates that certain highly specific disruptive effects in immediate memory for tonal pitch generalize across octaves. Pitch recognition was required after a retention interval during which six other tones were played. The effects of including in the interpolated sequence tones which were removed by exactly an octave from those which had already been demonstrated to produce disruption were investigated. Generalization of these interference effects was found to result both from tones which were displaced an octave higher and (to a lesser extent) from tones which were displaced an octave lower. It is concluded that the memory store that retains information concerning the pitch of ifidividual tones is bidimensional in nature, both “tone height” and “tone chroma” being represented.     

Generality of interference by tonal stimuli in recognition memory for pitch

An investigation was made into the disruptive effects on pitch recognition produced by tones taken from beyond the octave from which the standard (S) and comparison (C) tones were taken. Pitch recognition was required after a retention interval during which eight other tones were played. Errors were compared for sequences in which the interpolated tones were taken from the same octave as were the S and C tones; in which they were taken from the octave above; in which they were taken from the octave below; and in which half of the intervening tones were taken from the octave above and the other half from the octave below, the order of choice of octave within the sequence being random. Large disruptive effects were produced by interpolated tones drawn from the higher and lower octaves, though these effects were slightly less than those produced by tones drawn from the same octave. The greatest disruptive effect occurred when the intervening tones in any one sequence were drawn from both the higher and the lower octaves. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Quantification of the hierarchy of tonal functions within a diatonic context

Listeners rated test tones falling in the octave range from middle to high C according to how well each completed a diatonic C major scale played in an adjacent octave just before the final test tone. Ratings were well explained in terms of three factors. The factors were distance in pitch height from the context tones, octave equivalence, and the following hierarchy of tonal functions: tonic tone, other tones of the major triad chord, other tones of a diatonic scale, and the nondiatonic tones. In these ratings, pitch height was more prominent for less musical listeners or with less musical (sinusoidal) tones, whereas octave equivalence and the tonal hierarchy prevailed for musical listeners, especially with harmonically richer tones. Ratings for quarter tones interpolated halfway between the halftone steps of the standard chromatic scale were approximately the averages of ratings for adjacent chromatic tones, suggesting failure to discriminate tones at this fine level of division.     

Responsiveness of Western adults to pitch-distributional information in melodic sequences

Responsiveness of musically trained and untrained adults to pitch-distributional information in melodic contexts was assessed. In Experiment 1, melodic contexts were pure-tone sequences, generated from either a diatonic or one of four nondiatonic tonesets, in which pitch-distributional information was manipulated by variation of the relative frequency of occurrence of tones from the toneset. Both the assignment of relative frequency of occurrence to tones and the construction of the (fixed) temporal order of tones within the sequences contravened the conventions of western tonal music. A probe-tone technique was employed. Each presentation of a sequence was followed by a probe tone, one of the 12 chromatic notes within the octave. Listeners rated the goodness of musical fit of the probe tone to the sequence. Probe-tone ratings were significantly related to frequency of occurrence of the probe tone in the sequence for both trained and untrained listeners. In addition, probe-tone ratings decreased as the pitch distance between the probe tone and the final tone of the sequence increased. For musically trained listeners, probe-tone ratings for diatonic sequences tended also to reflect the influence of an internalized tonal schema. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the temporal location of tones in the sequences could not alone account for the effect of frequency of occurrence in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 tested musically untrained listeners under the conditions of Experiment 1, with the exception that the temporal order of tones in each sequence was randomized across trials. The effect of frequency of occurrence found in Experiment 1 was replicated and strengthened.     

Ideomotor effects of pitch on continuation tapping

The ideomotor principle predicts that perception will modulate action where overlap exists between perceptual and motor representations of action. This effect is demonstrated with auditory stimuli. Previous perceptual evidence suggests that pitch contour and pitch distance in tone sequences may elicit tonal motion effects consistent with listeners' implicit awareness of the lawful dynamics of locomotive bodies. To examine modulating effects of perception on action, participants in a continuation tapping task produced a steady tempo. Auditory tones were triggered by each tap. Pitch contour randomly and persistently varied within trials. Pitch distance between successive tones varied between trials. Although participants were instructed to ignore them, tones systematically affected finger dynamics and timing. Where pitch contour implied positive acceleration, the following tap and the intertap interval (ITI) that it completed were faster. Where pitch contour implied negative acceleration, the following tap and the ITI that it completed were slower. Tempo was faster with greater pitch distance. Musical training did not predict the magnitude of these effects. There were no generalized effects on timing variability. Pitch contour findings demonstrate how tonal motion may elicit the spontaneous production of accents found in expressive music performance.     

A perceptual investigation of polytonality

Summary Four experiments investigated the perception of tonal structure in polytonal music. The experiments used musical excerpts in which the upper stave of the music suggested a different key than the lower stave. In Experiment 1, listeners rated the goodness of fit of probe tones following an excerpt from Dubois's Circus. Results suggested that listeners were sensitive to two keys, and weighted them according to their perceived importance within the excerpt. Experiment 2 confirmed that music within each stave reliably conveyed key structure on its own. In Experiment 3, listeners rated probe tones following an excerpt from Milhaud's Sonata No. 1 for Piano, in which different keys were conveyed in widely separate pitch registers. Ratings were collected across three octaves. Listeners did not associate each key with a specific register. Rather, ratings for all three octave registers reflected only the key associated with the upper stave. Experiment 4 confirmed that the music within each stave reliably conveyed key structure on its own. It is suggested that when one key predominates in a polytonal context, other keys may not contribute to the overall perceived tonal structure. The influence of long-term knowledge and immediate context on the perception of tonal structure in polytonal music is discussed.     

Tonal expectations influence pitch perception

In this study, we investigated the influence of tonal relatedness on pitch perception in melodies. Tonal expectations for target tones were manipulated in melodic contexts while controlling sensory expectations, thus allowing us to assess specifically the influence oftonal expectations on pitch perception. Three experimentsprovided converging evidence that tonal relatedness modulates pitch perception in nonmusician listeners. Experiment 1 showed, with a rating task, the influence of the tonal relatedness of a target tone on listeners' judgments of tuning/mistuning. Experiment 2 showed, with a priming task, that pitch processing of in-tune tones was faster for tonally related targets than for less related targets. Experiment 3 showed, with a comparison task, that discrimination performance for small mistunings was better when the to-be-compared tones were tonally related to the melodic context. Findings are discussed in relation to psychoacoustic research on contextual pitch perception and to studies showing facilitation of early processing steps via knowledge- and attention-related processes.     

Sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range

Striking changes in sensitivity to tonality across the pitch range are reported. Participants were presented a key-defining context (do-mi-do-sol) followed by one of the 12 chromatic tones of the octave, and rated the goodness of fit of the probe tone to the context. The set of ratings, called the probe-tone profile, was compared to an established standardised profile for the Western tonal hierarchy. The presentation of context and probe tones at low and high pitch registers resulted in significantly reduced sensitivity to tonality. Sensitivity was especially poor for presentations in the lowest octaves where inharmonicity levels were substantially above the threshold for detection. We propose that sensitivity to tonality may be influenced by pitch salience (or a co-varying factor such as exposure to pitch distributional information) as well as suprathreshold inharmonicity.     

Aptitude-related differences in auditory information processing: effects of selective attention and tone duration

College students selected for high or low aptitude performed an auditory backward recognition masking task in which tones differed in pitch (770 or 870 Hz) and duration (10, 13 or 20 msec). Ss were required to attend selectively to the pitch but not to the duration of the targets. As predicted, higher aptitude was associated with lower recognition thresholds at all tone durations. Although increased attentional demands impaired recognition thresholds, this had no apparent differential effect on aptitude-related differences in auditory information processing.     

Absolute pitch in infancy and adulthood: the role of tonal structure

Despite many similarities in infant and adult auditory processing, the literature suggests that two aspects of music perception, pitch processing and knowledge of tonal structure, change over development. The current experiments assess the use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone sequence statistical learning task containing tonal structure. The results suggest that infants preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, supporting the hypothesis that absolute pitch is present in infancy, whereas adults tracked both absolute and relative pitch patterns. Infants and adults detected the tonal structure in the input, suggesting that humans are attuned to basic aspects of tonality early in life.     

A bidimensional model of pitch in the recognition of melodies

Pitch can be conceptualized as a bidimensional quantity, reflecting both the overall pitch level of a tone (tone height) and its position in the octave (tone chroma). Though such a conceptualization has been well supported for perception of a single tone, it has been argued that the dimension of tone chroma is irrelevant in melodic perception. In the current study, melodies were subjected to structural transformations designed to evaluate the effects of interval magnitude, contour, tone height, and tone chroma. In two transformations, the component tones of a melody were displaced by octave intervals, either preserving or violating the pattern of changes in pitch direction (melodic contour). Replicating previous work, when contour was violated perception of the melody was severely disrupted. In contrast, when contour was preserved the melodies were identified as accurately as the untransformed melodies. In other transformations, a variety of forms of contour information were preserved, while eliminating information for absolute pitch and interval magnitude. The level of performance on all such transformations fell between the levels observed in the other two conditions. These results suggest that the bidimensional model of pitch is applicable to recognition of melodies as well as single tones. Moreover, the results argue that contour, as well as interval magnitude, is providing essential information for melodic perception.     

Octave equivalence as measured by similarity ratings

Octave equivalence refers to the musical equivalence of notes separated by one or more octaves; such notes are assigned the same name in the musical scale. The present series of experiments was an attempt to determine whether octave equivalence would be incorporated into subjects’ similarity ratings of pairs of tones or tone sequences. In the first experiment, subjects on each trial rated the similarity of two successively presented tones. The results failed to show evidence of octave equivalence. In subsequent experiments, the range of frequency values presented and the musical context were manipulated. Evidence of octave equivalence was found only when the range of tone height differences presented was small; the effect of musical context was negligible. The implications of these results for theories of music perception and recognition are discussed.     

Exploring the elementary harmonic forces in the tonal system

To study the elementary expectations that arise in the perception of tonal music, an exploratory study was performed in which subjects heard a sequence of four chords (to induce a key or tonality) followed by one tone (1 of the 12 tones within an octave), and indicated which tone they expected to be the next tone. Responses were divided into three groups: a random, a fifth, and a tonal group. The expectations in the tonal group are of main interest, as they seem to originate from a tonal representation. In this representation the tonic attracts almost all tones, although to different degrees, while the dominant and the mediant function as centripetal centers that attract only nearby tones. A preliminary model for the formation of elementary expectations based on a 3-level mental representation of the tones in a key is proposed, The predictive capability of the model is compared to that of existing models.     

Acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal functions in music

The acquisition of the hierarchy of tonal stabilities in music is investigated in children of elementary school age. Listeners judge how good short tone sequences sound as melodies. The ratings show a pattern of increasing differentiation of the pitches in an octave range. The youngest listeners distinguish between scale and nonscale tones; older listeners distinguish between the tonic triad tones and other scale components. A group of adult listeners show octave equivalence and temporal asymmetries, with a preference for sequences ending on the more stable tones within the hierarchy. Pitch height effects do not interact with the age of the listener. These results are discussed in terms of the primacy of physical variables, novice-expert differences, and general cognitive principles governing the acquisition and development of internal representations of pitch relationships.     

Impaired categorical perception of lexical tones in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of categorical perception. The lack of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel 2003, 2008, 2012).     

Interference in memory for tonal pitch: Implications for a working-memory model

The degree of interference caused by different kinds of stimuli on memory for tonal pitch was studied. Musically trained and untrained subjects heard a sequence of two tones separated by an interval of 5 sec. The tones were either identical in pitch or differed by a semitone. Subjects had to decide whether the tones were identical or not. The interval was filled with tonal, verbal, or visual material under attended and unattended conditions. The results revealed clear group differences. Musically trained subjects' retention of the first test tone was only affected by the interposition of other tones. In contrast, the performance of musically untrained subjects was also affected by verbal and visual items. The findings are discussed in the framework of Baddeley's (1986) working-memory model.     

Proactive interference of a sequence of tones in a two-tone pitch comparison task

Subjects compared pitches of a standard tone and a comparison tone separated by 1,300–3,000 msec and responded according to whether the comparison tone sounded higher or lower in pitch than the standard tone. Three interfering tones at 300-msec intervals were presented before each pair of tones. Their pitch range varied, being either below or above the pitch of the standard tone; in some of the trials, their pitches were identical to the pitch of the standard tone (no interference). The highest error rate in performance was found when the interfering tones and the comparison tone deviated in the same direction in pitch from the standard tone. In turn, their deviations in the opposite directions resulted in the lowest error rate. This effect was not found to be dependent on whether the interfering tones were randomly ordered or monotonically ordered, together with the standard tone, into melodically ascending/descending sequences. An intermediate error rate in performance was found when the interfering tones and the standard tone were identical. The results support earlier hypotheses, presented in the context of retroactive interference, by demonstrating proactive interference of a tone sequence at the level of representations of individual tones.     

Octave generalization and tune recognition

An experiment was performed to investigate whether or not we are able to use octave generalization in recognizing tunes. The firat half of the tune “Yankee Doodle” wu chosen as the test sequence. This was universally recognized when played in any one of three octaves. However, when the sequence was played in identical fashion. except that each note was chosen randomly from one of the same three octaves, the percentage correct recognition was not significantly different from that obtained when the sequence was played as a series of clicks with the pitch information omitted but the rhythmic information retained. It is concluded that tune recognition takes place along a channel which is independent from that which gives rise to octave generalization. The relevance of this finding to the theory of music recognition proposed by Deutsch (1969) is discussed.     

Perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre.

These experiments examined perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre. Experiment 1, through the use of the Garner classification tasks, found that pitch and timbre of isolated tones interact. Classification times showed interference from uncorrelated variation in the irrelevant attribute and facilitation from correlated variation; the effects were symmetrical. Experiments 2 and 3 examined how musical pitch and timbre function in longer sequences. In recognition memory tasks, a target tone always appeared in a fixed position in the sequences, and listeners were instructed to attend to either its pitch or its timbre. For successive tones, no interactions between timbre and pitch were found. That is, changing the pitches of context tones did not affect timbre recognition, and vice versa. The tendency to perceive pitch in relation to other context pitches was strong and unaffected by whether timbre was constant or varying. In contrast, the relative perception of timbre was weak and was found only when pitch was constant. These results suggest that timbre is perceived more in absolute than in relative terms. Perceptual implications for creating patterns in music with timbre variations are discussed.     

Tonal hierarchy representations in auditory imagery

Two experiments investigated psychological representations of musical tonality in auditory imagery. In Experiment 1, musically trained participants heard a single tone as a perceptual cue and built an auditory image of a specified major tonality based on that cue; participants’ images were then assessed using judgments of probe tones. In Experiment 2 participants imaged a minor tonality rather than a major one. Analysis of the probe tone ratings indicated that participants successfully imaged both major and minor tonal hierarchies, demonstrating that auditory imagery functions comparably to auditory perception. In addition, the strength of the major tonal image was dependent upon the pitch and tonal relations of the perceptual cue and the to-be-imaged tonality. Finally, representations of minor tonal hierarchies were less robust than those of major ones, converging with perceptual evidence that minor tonalities are less psychologically stable than major tonalities.