Abstract
We tested non-musicians and musicians in an auditory psychophysical experiment to assess the effects of timbre manipulation on pitch-interval discrimination. Both groups were asked to indicate the larger of two presented intervals, comprised of four sequentially presented pitches; the second or fourth stimulus within a trial was either a sinusoidal (or “pure”), flute, piano, or synthetic voice tone, while the remaining three stimuli were all pure tones. The interval-discrimination tasks were administered parametrically to assess performance across varying pitch distances between intervals (“interval-differences”). Irrespective of timbre, musicians displayed a steady improvement across interval-differences, while non-musicians only demonstrated enhanced interval discrimination at an interval-difference of 100 cents (one semitone in Western music). Surprisingly, the best discrimination performance across both groups was observed with pure-tone intervals, followed by intervals containing a piano tone. More specifically, we observed that: 1) timbre changes within a trial affect interval discrimination; and 2) the broad spectral characteristics of an instrumental timbre may influence perceived pitch or interval magnitude and make interval discrimination more difficult.
Highlights
The ability to perceive changing pitch in sounds is crucial for both speech and music
In a recent experiment [12], we reduced the musical context by choosing frequencies that were not assigned to note names and interval magnitudes that are not often used in Western music (e.g., 25, 50, 75 cents), except one interval at 100 cents
Musicians discriminated between intervals better than nonmusicians across all timbres, and interval discrimination was best with pure tones
Summary
The ability to perceive changing pitch in sounds is crucial for both speech and music. Since pitch intervals serve such a fundamental role in music, numerous studies have investigated the ability to discriminate pitch intervals in Western musical contexts (for a comprehensive review, see [2]). These experiments included tasks such as interval categorization or discrimination of interval magnitudes at or around musically relevant intervals [3,4,5,6,7], correcting mistuned intervals [8,9], and assessment of performance intonation [10,11]. People with extensive musical expertise exhibited interval-discrimination thresholds of 100 cents, and non-musicians displayed larger thresholds [12], which: 1)
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