Adjustment of successive and simultaneous intervals by musically experienced and inexperienced subjects

Why Mozart? Information Processing Abilities of Gifted Young Musicians

An information processing model based on the neuropsychology of Alexander Luria was employed to investigate individual differences among normal and musically gifted children in their perception of pitch sequences with various degrees of structural coherence. The Luria model has three orthogonal dimensions of information processing: successive and simultaneous synthesis for encoding information, and executive synthesis which involves attention. It was hypothesised that music perception involves the cooperative interaction of these three information processing dimensions. Children with demonstrated musical precocity were compared with normal children on the three Luria model dimensions and on their perception of musical structure. The results highlighted the importance of metacognitive processes for realising extreme musical talent.

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.

Intonation of musical intervals by musical intervals by deaf subjects stimulated with single bipolar cochlear implant electrodes

Some subjects with cochlear implants have been shown to associate electrical stimulus pulse rates with the pitches of musical tones. In order to clarify the role of these pitch sensations in a musical context, the present investigation examined the intonation accuracy achieved by implant subjects when adjusting pulse rates in the reconstruction of musical intervals. Using a method of adjustment, the subjects altered a variable pulse rate, relative to a fixed reference rate, on one electrode, in the tuning of musical intervals abstracted from familiar melodies. At low pulse rates, subjects generally tuned the intervals to the same frequency ratios which define tonal musical intervals in normal-hearing listeners, with error margins comparable to musically untrained subjects. Two subjects were, in addition, able to transpose these melodic intervals from a standard reference pulse rate to higher and lower reference rates (reference and target pulse rates with geometric means of the intervals ranging from 81 to 466 pulses/s). Generally, the intervals were adjusted on a ratio scale, according to the same frequency ratios which define analogous acoustical musical intervals. These results support the hypothesis that, at low pulse rates, a temporal code in the auditory nerve alone is capable of defining musical pitch.

Tuning of diatonic scales by violinists, pianists, and nonmusicians

The present study shows that playing a particular musical instrument influences tuning preference. Violinists (n = 7), pianists (n = 7), and nonmusicians (n = 10) were required to adjust three notes (E, A, and B) in computer-generated, eight-tone ascending and descending diatonic scales of C major. The results indicated that (1) violinists set the three tones closer to Pythagorean intonation than do pianists (p < .01), (2) pianists fit closet to equal-tempered intonation (p < .01), and (3) nonmusicians do not show any preference for a specific intonation model. These findings are consistent with the view that tuning preference is determined by musical experience more than by characteristics of the auditory system. The relevance of these results to theories of cultural conditioning and assessment of tonal perception is discussed.