The musical environment and auditory plasticity: hearing the pitch of percussion

Neil M Mclachlan,David J T Marco,Sarah J Wilson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00768

Abstract

Although musical skills clearly improve with training, pitch processing has generally been believed to be biologically determined by the behavior of brain stem neural mechanisms. Two main classes of pitch models have emerged over the last 50 years. Harmonic template models have been used to explain cross-channel integration of frequency information, and waveform periodicity models have been used to explain pitch discrimination that is much finer than the resolution of the auditory nerve. It has been proposed that harmonic templates are learnt from repeated exposure to voice, and so it may also be possible to learn inharmonic templates from repeated exposure to inharmonic music instruments. This study investigated whether pitch-matching accuracy for inharmonic percussion instruments was better in people who have trained on these instruments and could reliably recognize their timbre. We found that adults who had trained with Indonesian gamelan instruments were better at recognizing and pitch-matching gamelan instruments than people with similar levels of music training, but no prior exposure to these instruments. These findings suggest that gamelan musicians were able to use inharmonic templates to support accurate pitch processing for these instruments. We suggest that recognition mechanisms based on spectrotemporal patterns of afferent auditory excitation in the early stages of pitch processing allow rapid priming of the lowest frequency partial of inharmonic timbres, explaining how music training can adapt pitch processing to different musical genres and instruments.

Highlights

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that environmental influences can enhance pitch processing abilities
This study showed that western musicians with gamelan training were better at recognizing gamelan instruments, and more consistent at matching their pitch at the lowest frequency partial than musicians with a similar level of training, but no exposure to gamelan
No differences in performance were found between musician groups for western instruments, indicating that the better performance by the gamelan musicians for gamelan instruments was not a result of superior pitch matching ability per se

Summary

Introduction

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that environmental influences can enhance pitch processing abilities. More recently a few studies have reported improvement in pitch matching accuracy with training (Hutchins and Peretz, 2011; McLachlan et al, 2013) In these studies most non-musicians initially displayed a level of pitch matching ability commensurate with the ability to perceive relatively large pitch intervals of around two semitones found in the prosody of European languages (Patel et al, 2006). This is consistent with pitch discrimination ability being defined by the behavioral demands of the environment, and with the more general ability of animals to learn to recognize and discriminate the frequency of sounds that have behavioral significance, such as conditioned reflexes in animals (Ohyama et al, 2003; Weinberger, 2011), and speech perception in humans (Liberman et al, 1967)

Methods

Results

Conclusion