The Effect of Instrumental Timbre on Interval Discrimination (original) (raw)
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Pitch-interval discrimination and musical expertise: Is the semitone a perceptual boundary?
2012
The ability to discriminate pitch changes (or intervals) is foundational for speech and music. In an auditory psychophysical experiment, musicians and non-musicians were tested with fixed-and roving-pitch discrimination tasks to investigate the effects of musical expertise on interval discrimination. The tasks were administered parametrically to assess performance across varying pitch distances between intervals. Both groups showed improvements in fixed-pitch interval discrimination as a function of increasing interval difference. Only musicians showed better roving-pitch interval discrimination as interval differences increased, suggesting that this task was too demanding for non-musicians. Musicians had better interval discrimination than non-musicians across most interval differences in both tasks. Interestingly, musicians exhibited improved interval discrimination starting at interval differences of 100 cents (a semitone in Western music), whereas non-musicians showed enhanced discrimination at interval differences exceeding 125 cents. Although exposure to Western music and speech may help establish a basic interval-discrimination threshold between 100 and 200 cents (intervals that occur often in Western languages and music), musical training presumably enhances auditory processing and reduces this threshold to a semitone. As musical expertise does not decrease this threshold beyond 100 cents, the semitone may represent a musical training-induced intervallic limit to acoustic processing. V
Frontiers in Psychology, 2014
The paradigm of Signal Detection Theory (SDT) was used to analyze the ability of professional pianists (N = 16) and string players (N = 15) to discriminate small F0 differences between consecutive musical tones, presented in pairs, with identical and with different (bright and dull) timbres. The sensitivity (d) and response bias (c) were heavily dependent on the timbral arrangement of the pairs of tones (the "comparable tones"), which can be interpreted as the influence of timbre-induced pitch shift on F0 discrimination. The participants were somewhat biased to "miss" signals when comparable tones had identical timbres and to make "false alarms" when the tones had different timbres. The d was lowest when the tones with a lower F0 in those stimulus-pairs containing tones with different timbres had a brighter timber, and highest when both tones had bright timbre. On average, the string players had a somewhat higher d and their perception was slightly less influenced by timbre-induced pitch shift when compared to the pianists. Nevertheless, the dependence of d and c on the timbral arrangement of the tones was registered in the case of all the participants at all the investigated pitch regions around D#3, D4, and C#5. Furthermore, the presence of a silence of 3.5 s-a silence interval-between the tones to be compared had an impact on both d-and c-values as well as on the degree of vulnerability to timbre-induced pitch shift.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2007
An Auditory Ambiguity Test (AAT) was taken twice by nonmusicians, musical amateurs, and professional musicians. The AAT comprised different tone pairs, presented in both within-pair orders, in which overtone spectra rising in pitch were associated with missing fundamental frequencies (F0) falling in pitch, and vice versa. The F0 interval ranged from 2 to 9 semitones. The participants were instructed to decide whether the perceived pitch went up or down; no information was provided on the ambiguity of the stimuli. The majority of professionals classified the pitch changes according to F0, even at the smallest interval. By contrast, most nonmusicians classified according to the overtone spectra, except in the case of the largest interval. Amateurs ranged in between. A plausible explanation for the systematic group differences is that musical practice systematically shifted the perceptual focus from spectral toward missing-F0 pitch, although alternative explanations such as different genetic dispositions of musicians and nonmusicians cannot be ruled out.
The Effect of Different Musical Timbres on Students' Identification of Melodic Intervals
1982
For this study, five hypotheses were formulatea stating that ability to identify melodic intervals liking music dictation is not affected by (1) the differences in imbre, (2) the use of familiar or unfamiliar timbres (MAJOR), (3) formal ear training experience (FETE).4._or (4) playing/performingexperience on an instrument (PPEM), and(M) that thexe is no significant interaction between PPEM and FETE. Two hundred and twenty college and university subjects were tested, using eh author written test of melodic interval identification. Melodic intervals were presented in random order by six instruments: clarinet, trumpet, piano, violen, ''xylophone, and synthekizer (sine waveform). Each instrument played"12 randomly assorted melodic intervals, based on C4 and not exceeding One octave. Results showed that FETE, PPEM, and MAJOR all affected subjects' "cores on intervals presented with different timbres. There was no significant interaction biltween PPEM and FETE.
The Perception of Musical Timbre
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
CHAPTER 7 T IMBRE is a misleadingly simple and vague word encompassing a very complex set of auditory attributes, as well as a plethora of psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, duration, and various environmental characteristics such as room reverberation. This leaves a wealth of possibilities that have been explored over the last 40 years or so. We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (1) it is a multifarious set of abstract sensory attributes, some of which are continuously varying (e.g. attack sharpness, brightness, nasality, richness), others of which are discrete or categorical (e.g., the 'blatt' at the beginning of a sforzando trombone sound or the pinched offset of a harpsichord sound), and (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identifi cation, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells), and thus involves the absolute categorization of a sound . The psychological approach to timbre has also included work on the musical implications of timbre as a set of formbearing dimensions in music ).
Does timbre affect the pitch?: estimations by musicians and non-musicians
2011
The present article focuses on the question of whether the timbre difference of two sounds with harmonic spectra, produced by natural musical instruments or the singing voice, may influence subjective assessments of the pitch of one sound in relation to the pitch of the other. The authors administered a series of perception tests to a group of professional musicians (n = 13) and a group of non-musicians (n = 13). The tests used the following pre-recorded sounds: the singing voice, the sound of the viola, and the sound of the trumpet. The participants had to compare the pitch of pair-wise presented successive tones and decide whether the second tone was either ‘flat’, ‘sharp ’ or ‘in tune’. Tests using stimuli in the pitch range around A3 (220 Hz) at a loudness level of approximately 90 phons revealed pitch shifts of significant magnitude likely to affect intonation quality in a musical performance among both musicians and non-musicians. The conclusion drawn from the study is that ti...
Production and Perception of Musical Intervals
Music Perception, 2006
In the first experiment, 13 professional singers performed a vocal exercise consisting of three ascending and descending melodic intervals: minor second, tritone, and perfect fifth. Seconds were sung more narrowly but fifths more widely in both directions, as compared to their equally tempered counterparts. In the second experiment, intonation accuracy in performances recorded from the first experiment was evaluated in a listening test. Tritones and fifths were more frequently classified as out of tune than seconds. Good correspondence was found between interval tuning and the listeners' responses. The performers themselves evaluated their performance almost randomly in the immediate post-performance situation but acted comparably to the independent group after listening to their own recording. The data suggest that melodic intervals may be, on an average, 20 to 25 cents out of tune and still be estimated as correctly tuned by expert listeners.
The perceptual interaction between the pitch and timbre of musical sound
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2001
The dependency of the brightness dimension of timbre on fundamental frequency ͑F0͒ was examined experimentally. Subjects compared the timbres of 24 synthetic stimuli, produced by the combination of six values of spectral centroid to obtain different values of expected brightness, and four F0's, ranging over 18 semitones. Subjects were instructed to ignore pitch differences. Dissimilarity scores were analyzed by both ANOVA and multidimensional scaling ͑MDS͒. Results show that timbres can be compared between stimuli with different F0's over the range tested, and that differences in F0 affect timbre dissimilarity in two ways. First, dissimilarity scores reveal a term proportional to F0 difference that shows up in the MDS solution as a dimension correlated with F0 and orthogonal to other timbre dimensions. Second, F0 affects systematically the timbre dimension ͑brightness͒ correlated with spectral centroid. Interestingly, both terms covaried with differences in F0 rather than chroma or consonance. The first term probably corresponds to pitch. The second can be eliminated if the formula for spectral centroid is modified by introducing a corrective factor dependent on F0.
Does timbre affect pitch? Estimations by musicians and non-musicians
Psychology of Music, 2010
The present article focuses on the question of whether the timbre difference of two sounds with harmonic spectra, produced by natural musical instruments or the singing voice, may influence subjective assessments of the pitch of one sound in relation to the pitch of the other. The authors administered a series of perception tests to a group of professional musicians (n = 13) and a group of non-musicians (n = 13). The tests used the following pre-recorded sounds: the singing voice, the sound of the viola, and the sound of the trumpet. The participants had to compare the pitch of pairwise presented successive tones and decide whether the second tone was either 'flat', 'sharp' or 'in tune'. Tests using stimuli in the pitch range around A3 (220 Hz) at a loudness level of approximately 90 phons revealed pitch shifts of significant magnitude likely to affect intonation quality in a musical performance among both musicians and non-musicians. The conclusion drawn from the study is that timbre-induced pitch shifts may attain magnitudes that are likely to lead to conflicts between subjective and fundamental-frequency-based pitch assessments. Situations are described in which such conflicts may arise in actual musical practice. Psychology of Music 39(3) 291-306