A reversal of the song advantage in vocal pitch imitation.

Peter Q Pfordresher

doi:10.1121/10.0009729

Abstract

Previous experiments have documented an advantage for vocal pitch-matching when participants sing back a short melody, in contrast to when participants attempt to imitate the pitch contour of spoken English. These results appear to confirm recent claims that music involves greater precision of pitch than speech. A re-analysis of these data is reported here that focuses on imitation of pitch trajectories within sung notes or spoken syllables. When analyzed this way, the domain-based difference reverses and speech imitation exhibits an advantage relative to song imitation. These results suggest that domain-specific advantages in imitation vary as a function of timescale.

Highlights

IntroductionA strong prevailing view in music cognition is that musical pitch is processed with finer grained precision than spoken pitch (Patel, 2011, 2014)
Because the central issue of this report is on the advantage of song over speech for different measures and timescales of analysis, song advantage difference scores were constructed in the following way
The analysis reported reveals a reversal of the previously reported song-advantage in vocal pitch imitation [e.g., Mantell and Pfordresher (2013)]

Summary

Introduction

A strong prevailing view in music cognition is that musical pitch is processed with finer grained precision than spoken pitch (Patel, 2011, 2014). This view is articulated most commonly with respect to perception. Syllables are generally considered to have a roughly analogous role to notes given that, like musical notes, syllables convey rhythm, and musical text-setting typically maps notes onto syllables. This difference in stability is quite prominent when comparing speech to instrumental music, and present when comparing speech to song, as I will show later. Listeners exhibit greater perceptual sensitivity to alterations of pitch and spectral fine structure for music than for speech (Albouy et al, 2020; Sares et al, 2018; Zatorre and Baum, 2012)

Methods

Results

Conclusion