Musical context affects detection of pitch differences in tones with different spectra.

Abstract

Pitch plays an important role in complex auditory tasks such as listening to music and understanding speech, yet pitch comparisons are more difficult when tones have different spectra. Since tones are rarely heard in isolation, the surrounding context may help or hinder pitch comparisons. The first study presented listeners with tone pairs in isolation or immediately following a tonal context, which consisted of a portion of a descending major scale with the target as the tonic. Listeners’ performance improved in the presence of the tonal context, but only when the tones within a pair differed in spectral content. In the second experiment, a variety of contexts were used, with the goal of discriminating between effects of tonal hierarchy and effects of predictability. Even with maximal predictability, presenting tone pairs after an “atonal” context consisting of notes from an octatonic scale yielded poorer performance than tone pairs in isolation. The results suggest that any advantage listeners derived from the tonal context in our first experiment was related more to placing the tone into an over-learned tonal hierarchy than to the likelihood of the target pitch within a predictable context. [Work supported by NIH Grant R01 DC 05216.]