Acoustic reversals of dichotic pitch patterns by musicians and nonmusicians

Abstract

Normal subjects acoustically reversed a significantly large proportion of responses to monaural pitch patterns. A dichotic approach to this reversal phenomenon might determine its origin. When 20 musicians and 20 nonmusicians were presented with 450 dichotic pairs of pitch pattern triads, the nonmusicians reversed more patterns than the musicians whether report condition was random or right‐ or left‐directed using manual, verbal, or hummed responses. When right and left ears were compared for both the hummed and verbal responses, there were significantly more left ear reversals in the right‐directed response and significantly more right ear reversals in the left‐directed response. There were no differences between conditions for the manual mode. There were more reversals when the right ear was reported first than when the left ear was reported first and more reversals when the left ear was reported second than when the right ear was reported second. However, there were significantly more reversals for the second reported pattern for all report conditions across response modes. These results indicate that acoustic reversals are probably related to memory decay.