Many listeners cannot discriminate major vs minor tone-scrambles regardless of presentation rate.

Abstract

A tone-scramble is a random sequence of pure tones. Previous studies have found that most listeners (≈ 70%) perform near chance in classifying rapid tone-scrambles composed of multiple copies of notes in G-major vs G-minor triads; the remaining listeners perform nearly perfectly [Chubb, Dickson, Dean, Fagan, Mann, Wright, Guan, Silva, Gregersen, and Kowalski (2013). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 134(4), 3067-3078; Dean and Chubb (2017). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 142(3), 1432-1440]. This study tested whether low-performing listeners might improve with slower stimuli. In separate tasks, stimuli were tone-scrambles presented at 115, 231, 462, and 923 notes per min. In each task, the listener classified (with feedback) stimuli as major vs minor. Listeners who performed poorly in any of these tasks performed poorly in all of them. Strikingly, performance was worst in the task with the slowest stimuli. In all tasks, most listeners were biased to respond "major" ("minor") if the stimulus ended on a note high (low) in pitch. Dean and Chubb introduced the name "scale-sensitivity" for the cognitive resource that separates high- from low-performing listeners in tone-scramble classification tasks, suggesting that this resource confers sensitivity to the full gamut of qualities that music can attain by being in a scale. In ruling out the possibility that performance in these tasks depends on speed of presentation, the current results bolster this interpretation.