Pitch Intervals Research Articles

Sequence Generation and Evaluation: A Novel Assessment of Musical Creativity

ABSTRACT Music is often considered an important domain for creativity. Traditional studies of musical creativity have examined musical improvisation using jazz as a model. While this approach has yielded many valuable insights about creativity’s cognitive and neural mechanisms, it has limited the study sample to those with the means to engage in improvisation within one specific Western style. Here, we introduce a novel tool for assessing musical creativity in the broader sample of individuals with no specialized training. In two experiments (n = 165) we show that this sequencer can be used in people with minimal training to generate a database of sequences composed at the Bohlen-Pierce scale and to evaluate them for creativity. Results show that creativity ratings are predicted by length of melodies, number of distinct pitches used, and information content of pitch intervals. Results also show some external validity with existing creativity tasks. We advocate the use of this sequencer in creativity research, as it provides a theoretically motivated, rigorous tool to examine the iterative process of producing and evaluating musical creativity.

Probing the neural dynamics of musicians’ and non-musicians’ consonant/dissonant perception: Joint analyses of electrical encephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

The perception of two (or more) simultaneous musical notes, depending on their pitch interval(s), could be broadly categorized as consonant or dissonant. Previous literature has suggested that musicians and non-musicians adopt different strategies when discerning music intervals: while musicians rely on the frequency ratios between the two fundamental frequencies, such as “perfect fifth” (3:2) as consonant and “tritone” (45:32) as dissonant intervals; non-musicians may rely on the presence of ‘roughness’ or ‘beats’, generated by the difference of fundamental frequencies, as the key elements of ‘dissonance’. The separate Event-Related Potential (ERP) differences in N1 and P2 along the midline electrodes provided evidence congruent with such ‘separate reliances’. To replicate and to extend, in this study we reran the previous experiment, and separately collected fMRI data of the same protocol (with sparse sampling modifications). The behavioral and EEG results largely corresponded to our previous finding. The fMRI results, with the joint analyses by univariate, psycho-physiological interaction, and representational similarity analysis (RSA) approaches, further reinforce the involvement of central midline-related brain regions, such as ventromedial prefrontal and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, in consonant/dissonance judgments. The final spatiotemporal searchlight RSA provided convincing evidence that the medial prefrontal cortex, along with the bilateral superior temporal cortex, is the joint locus of midline N1 and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex for the P2 effect (for musicians). Together, these analyses reaffirm that musicians rely more on experience-driven knowledge for consonance/dissonance perception; but also demonstrate the advantages of multiple analyses in constraining the findings from both EEG and fMRI.

Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a "musi-linguistic" continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

The Limited and The Limitless: Harmonic Voltas and Puns in the Third Movement of Ben Johnston’s Seventh String Quartet

Abstract Extended just intonation confronts us with musical problems arising from the sheer array and variety of pitch relationships that can be written, played, and heard. Through an analysis of Ben Johnston’s Seventh String Quartet as a case study, this essay addresses the diversity of these pitch relationships by suggesting a three-way categorization of just intonation ratios: primary intervals (simple integer ratios), ectopic intervals (ratios with no primary interval analogue), and intermediary intervals (ratios with a close primary interval analogue). I suggest a listening strategy based on the categorization resulting in two analytical models. A voltaic analysis recognizes changes in the pitch domain indicated by the differences between primary and intermediary intervals. A pitch pun analysis emphasizes the small magnitude of the differences between primary and intermediary intervals and the slow drift away from a secure sense of pitch place. Finally, I combine these views to compare the two analytical strategies as applied to the last measures of Johnston’s Seventh String Quartet and speculate on the implications of these strategies for hearing and conceiving of pitch intervals.

An efficient method to build music generative model by controlling both general and local note characteristics

It has been shown that since the rapid development of the entertainment industry, music generation has become a focused research topic. Numerous methods for creating music, or musical notes specifically have been announced, each with distinct characteristics and advantages. These methods usually concentrated on these two aspects: the overall harmony of the whole music score and the link between adjacent notes, which this research referred respectively as the general and local aspects. This study proposes a model with combined methods that is capable of deriving benefits from these both aspects, hence creating music with good quality in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Various results based on those have been discussed and judged for efficient enhancing as well as for future development opportunities. The value of Average Pitch Interval (API) achieved a remarkable value of 1.43, along with the note range of 12.145; while on the subjective aspect, survey participants gave 6.81 score for the generated music, yet only about 70% of them can distinguish the generated from the genuine pieces of music.

A new intonation quality evaluation method based on self-supervised learning

Intonation evaluation is an important precondition that offers guidance to music practices. This paper present a new intonation quality evaluation method based on self-supervised learning to solve the fuzzy evaluation problem at the critical intonations. Firstly, the effective features of audios are automatically extracted by a self-supervised learning-based deep neural network. Secondly, the intonation evaluation of the single tones and pitch intervals are carried out by combining with the key local features of the audios. Finally, the intonation evaluation method characterized by physical calculations, which simulates and enhances the manual assessment. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved the accuracy of 93.38% which is the average value of multiple experimental results obtained by randomly assigning audio data, which is much higher than that of the frequency-based intonation evaluation method(37.5%). In addition, this method has been applied in music teaching for the first time and delivers visual evaluation results.

A Domain-Knowledge-Inspired Music Embedding Space and a Novel Attention Mechanism for Symbolic Music Modeling

Following the success of the transformer architecture in the natural language domain, transformer-like architectures have been widely applied to the domain of symbolic music recently. Symbolic music and text, however, are two different modalities. Symbolic music contains multiple attributes, both absolute attributes (e.g., pitch) and relative attributes (e.g., pitch interval). These relative attributes shape human perception of musical motifs. These important relative attributes, however, are mostly ignored in existing symbolic music modelling methods with the main reason being the lack of a musically-meaningful embedding space where both the absolute and relative embeddings of the symbolic music tokens can be efficiently represented. In this paper, we propose the Fundamental Music Embedding (FME) for symbolic music based on a bias-adjusted sinusoidal encoding within which both the absolute and the relative attributes can be embedded and the fundamental musical properties (e.g., translational invariance) are explicitly preserved. Taking advantage of the proposed FME, we further propose a novel attention mechanism based on the relative index, pitch and onset embeddings (RIPO attention) such that the musical domain knowledge can be fully utilized for symbolic music modelling. Experiment results show that our proposed model: RIPO transformer which utilizes FME and RIPO attention outperforms the state-of-the-art transformers (i.e., music transformer, linear transformer) in a melody completion task. Moreover, using the RIPO transformer in a downstream music generation task, we notice that the notorious degeneration phenomenon no longer exists and the music generated by the RIPO transformer outperforms the music generated by state-of-the-art transformer models in both subjective and objective evaluations. The code of the proposed method is available online: github.com/guozixunnicolas/FundamentalMusicEmbedding.

Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution

Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural regularities and diversities in human song are thought to emerge from this transmission process, but testing how underlying mechanisms contribute to musical structures remains a key challenge. Here, we introduce an automatic online pipeline that streamlines large-scale cultural transmission experiments using a sophisticated and naturalistic modality: singing. We quantify the evolution of 3,424 melodies orally transmitted across 1,797 participants in the United States and India. This approach produces a high-resolution characterization of how oral transmission shapes melody, revealing the emergence of structures that are consistent with widespread musical features observed cross-culturally (small pitch sets, small pitch intervals, and arch-shaped melodic contours). We show how the emergence of these structures is constrained by individual biases in our participants-vocal constraints, working memory, and cultural exposure-which determine the size, shape, and complexity of evolving melodies. However, their ultimate effect on population-level structures depends on social dynamics taking place during cultural transmission. When participants recursively imitate their own productions (individual transmission), musical structures evolve slowly and heterogeneously, reflecting idiosyncratic musical biases. When participants instead imitate others' productions (social transmission), melodies rapidly shift toward homogeneous structures, reflecting shared structural biases that may underpin cross-cultural variation. These results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of how human song structures emerge via cultural transmission.

A Computational Approach to the Detection and Prediction of (Ir)Regularity in Children's Folk Songs

We examine (ir)regularity in the musical structure of 736 monophonic children's folk songs from 22 European countries, by simulating and detecting (ir)regularity with the computational model, IDyOM, and our own algorithm, Ir_Reg, which classifies melodies according to regularity of their musical structure. IDyOM offers a range of viewpoints which allow observation and prediction of various musical features. We used five viewpoints to measure the information content and entropy of musical events in songs. Analysis across the data shows absence of irregular musical structure in children's folk songs from Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Portugal, Hungary, and Romania. Conversely, absence of regular structure in children's folk songs was found in Great Britain, Norway and Switzerland. Further analysis of (ir)regularity, by individual country, revealed the importance of patterns repeated at pitch in regular songs, and a higher occurrence of transposed repeated patterns in irregular songs. Principal component analysis (PCA) shows the salience of pitch and pitch intervals in the perception of (ir)regular structure. Neither rhythm nor contour affects the perception of regularity. Recurring pulse/meter and arch-like melodic structure were found in the majority of children's folk songs. The study shows that irregularity exists in children's folk songs, and that this genre can be complex.

비전공자를 위한 작곡 교양교과목 개발 운영 사례연구

This study aims to discuss the various advantages and problems that have emerged through the development and operation of a course called “Understanding Music through Composition Experience”, which was opened as a liberal arts course for college students without majoring in music at universities, and to suggest directions for development and improvement. In this three-step class, “Basic Music Theory, Melody Composition Method, Garage Band Application”, the basic music theory essential for composition was found out through the course operation, and melody composed by students were compared according to Schoenberg's tonal music composition theory. I tried to apply the melody and harmony created here to the Garage Band, and analyzed the satisfaction of the students. In conclusion, basic music theory regarding tonality, scale, and pitch interval is considered important for practical composition ability, more practice on rhythm and time is required, and emphasis should be placed on harmony with chords in melody composition. This study is meaningful in suggesting future development directions for creative music classes as liberal arts subjects in universities and class design using smart phone application.

Event-Related Potential Evidence for Involuntary Consciousness During Implicit Memory Retrieval.

Classical notion claims that a memory is implicit if has nothing to do with consciousness during the information retrieval from storage, or is otherwise explicit. Here, we demonstrate event-related potential evidence for involuntary consciousness during implicit memory retrieval. We designed a passive oddball paradigm for retrieval of implicit memory in which an auditory stream of Shepard tones with musical pitch interval contrasts were delivered to the subjects. These contrasts evoked a mismatch negativity response, which is an event-related potential and a neural marker of implicit memory, in the subjects with long-term musical training, but not in the subjects without. Notably, this response was followed by a salient P3 component which implies involvement of involuntary consciousness in the implicit memory retrieval. Finally, source analysis of the P3 revealed moving dipoles from the frontal lobe to the insula, a brain region closely related to conscious attention. Our study presents a case of involvement of involuntary consciousness in the implicit memory retrieval and suggests a potential challenge to the classical definition of implicit memory.

Listening to the silent struggles of bipolar disorder through sonification of iMoodJournal data.

Listening to the silent struggles of bipolar disorder through sonification of iMoodJournal data.

A Case Study of the Famous Fantasia under the Development Variation Environment Monitoring to Analyze the Characteristics of the Composition of the Suite.

In order to better grasp the quintessence of Brahms's suite-style piano suite and guide researchers and music creators, this thesis takes Brahms's late representative work Fantasia Op.116 as the research object and attempts based on the perspective of environmental monitoring of development and changes to analyze creative individuality in his seven works as well as the unity of the whole structure under the “developing variation” through elaborating the theory of “developing variation,” the creative features of works in Fantasia Op.116, and the unity of the materials under the “developing variation” from the perspective of creative techniques. The thesis finds that, on the one hand, Brahms used pitch interval structural capacity, nontraditional harmony, personalized rhythmic counterpoint, and prose structure and other specific variation techniques, embodying individuation differences and expanding the techniques used in the classical period; on the other hand, he changed, derived, and extended the theme motivation in works, specifically embodying the using of “developing variation” in his seven works, which solves the problems of unity and interconnectedness among works and provides inspirations for the creation of piano suites by later composers.

Musical instrument familiarity affects statistical learning of tone sequences

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, computerized instruments or familiar instruments (piano or violin). Knowledge of the statistical regularities was measured as by a two-alternative forced choice recognition task, requiring discrimination between novel sequences that followed versus violated the statistical structure, assessed at three time points (immediately post-training, as well as one day and one week post-training). Compared to artificial instruments, training on familiar instruments resulted in reduced accuracy. Moreover, sequences from familiar instruments – but not artificial instruments – were more likely to be judged as grammatical when they contained intervals that approximated those commonly used in Western music, even though this cue was non-informative. Overall, these results demonstrate that instrument familiarity can interfere with the learning of novel statistical regularities, presumably through biasing memory representations to be aligned with Western musical structures. These results demonstrate that real-world experience influences statistical learning in a non-linguistic domain, supporting the view that statistical learning involves the continuous updating of existing representations, rather than the establishment of entirely novel ones.

Singing proficiency of prelingually deaf children with cochlear implants as evaluated by a musician

Cochlear implant (CI) has become the standard clinical rehabilitation device for children born with hearing impairments. While CI has been successful in helping those children with speech and language development, many studies have found that children with CIs have trouble perceiving tones and pitches. Poor pitch perception would lead to poor vocal singing. In a previous study, samples of singing by normal-hearing children (N = 43) and deaf children with CIs (N = 81) were analyzed acoustically. The present study analyzed those 124 samples with human judgement (i.e., by a musician). The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the correlation between objective measures using acoustic analysis and subjective measures using an adult musician listener. The musician provided scores for each singing sample on several categories of pitch and tempo. The results showed that the children with CIs did well with tempo, but they had trouble singing the correct pitches and the overall listening pleasure was low. Furthermore, the scores of human judgements on pitch direction, pitch consistency, and pitch interval consistency were significantly correlated with the interval deviation computed from the acoustic analyses of the singing samples (with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.541 to 0.624, all p < 0.05).

Dimension-selective attention and dimensional salience modulate cortical tracking of acoustic dimensions

Some theories of auditory categorization suggest that auditory dimensions that are strongly diagnostic for particular categories - for instance voice onset time or fundamental frequency in the case of some spoken consonants - attract attention. However, prior cognitive neuroscience research on auditory selective attention has largely focused on attention to simple auditory objects or streams, and so little is known about the neural mechanisms that underpin dimension-selective attention, or how the relative salience of variations along these dimensions might modulate neural signatures of attention. Here we investigate whether dimensional salience and dimension-selective attention modulate the cortical tracking of acoustic dimensions. In two experiments, participants listened to tone sequences varying in pitch and spectral peak frequency; these two dimensions changed at different rates. Inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) and amplitude of the EEG signal at the frequencies tagged to pitch and spectral changes provided a measure of cortical tracking of these dimensions. In Experiment 1, tone sequences varied in the size of the pitch intervals, while the size of spectral peak intervals remained constant. Cortical tracking of pitch changes was greater for sequences with larger compared to smaller pitch intervals, with no difference in cortical tracking of spectral peak changes. In Experiment 2, participants selectively attended to either pitch or spectral peak. Cortical tracking was stronger in response to the attended compared to unattended dimension for both pitch and spectral peak. These findings suggest that attention can enhance the cortical tracking of specific acoustic dimensions rather than simply enhancing tracking of the auditory object as a whole.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation. However, few studies have identified clear quantitative characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD. This study investigated imitation of speech and song in English-speaking individuals with and without ASD and its modulation by age. Participants consisted of 25 autistic children and 19 autistic adults, who were compared to 25 children and 19 adults with typical development matched on age, gender, musical training, and cognitive abilities. The task required participants to imitate speech and song stimuli with varying pitch and duration patterns. Acoustic analyses of the imitation performance suggested that individuals with ASD were worse than controls on absolute pitch and duration matching for both speech and song imitation, although they performed as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching. Furthermore, the two groups produced similar numbers of pitch contour, pitch interval-, and time errors. Across both groups, sung pitch was imitated more accurately than spoken pitch, whereas spoken duration was imitated more accurately than sung duration. Children imitated spoken pitch more accurately than adults when it came to speech stimuli, whereas age showed no significant relationship to song imitation. These results reveal a vocal imitation deficit across speech and music domains in ASD that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching. This finding provides evidence for shared mechanisms between speech and song imitation, which involves independent implementation of relative versus absolute features. LAY SUMMARY: Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation of actions and gestures. Characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD remain unclear. By comparing speech and song imitation, this study shows that individuals with ASD have a vocal imitative deficit that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching, while performing as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching, across speech and music domains.

Perception and learning of relative pitch by musicians using the vibrotactile mode

This study investigated the perception and learning of relative pitch using vibrotactile stimuli by musicians with and without a hearing impairment. Notes from C3 to B4 were presented to the fingertip and forefoot. Pre- and post-training tests in which 420 pairs of notes were presented randomly were carried out without any feedback to participants. After the pre-training test, 16 short training sessions were carried out over six weeks with 72 pairs of notes per session and participants told whether their answers were correct. For amateur and professional musicians with normal hearing and professional musicians with a severe or profound hearing loss, larger pitch intervals were easier to identify correctly than smaller intervals. Musicians with normal hearing had a high success rate for relative pitch discrimination as shown by pre- and post-training tests, and when using the fingertips, there was no significant difference between amateur and professional musicians. After training, median scores on the tests in which stimuli were presented to the fingertip and forefoot were >70% for intervals of 3–12 semitones. Training sessions reduced the variability in the responses of amateur and professional musicians with normal hearing and improved their overall ability. There was no significant difference between the relative pitch discrimination abilities between one and 11 semitones, as shown by the pre-training test, of professional musicians with and without a severe/profound hearing loss. These findings indicate that there is potential for vibration to be used to facilitate group musical performance and music education in schools for the deaf.

Deviant consonance and dissonance capture attention differently only when task demand is high: An ERP study with three-stimulus oddball paradigm

The current study investigated whether consonance (imperfect consonance: major third) and dissonance (minor second) would capture attention differently when they occurred as chords (combinations of two tones) that were deviant from their context. In addition, we also examined how task demand would modulate these chords' attentional capture. For this investigation, we used an auditory three-stimulus oddball paradigm in which these chords were presented as deviant stimuli (5% each) among frequent standard (80%) and infrequent target (10%) pure tones. The task difficulty was manipulated by changing pitch intervals between standard and target tones. The results showed that these chords elicited dual-peak P3a, and that consonance enhanced the late phase of P3a compared to dissonance, only when the task demand was high. These findings revealed that deviant consonance and dissonance captured attention differently; in particular, consonance captured attention more strongly than dissonance, and this effect was induced by high task demand. This attentional capture difference between the chord categories was induced through enhanced focus of attention on the pitch dimension of oddball stimuli. In addition, the deviant chords might have been processed by a mechanism similar to that which processes novel stimuli, and these chords' differences might have affected not the novelty detection process, but a process which orients attentional resources to deviant chords, which were recognized as novel stimuli.

Main melody extraction from polyphonic music based on frequency amplitude and multi-octave relation

Most melody extraction methods focus only on the temporal continuity of the frequency, which would result in the poor effect of melody extraction for many algorithms. This paper proposes a new main melody extraction framework based on a new salience function. Firstly In the multi-pitch extraction stage, a new salience function combining the frequency and frequency amplitude continuity between adjacent frames is proposed to select fundamental frequency points. By this way, we can not only retain the latent fundamental frequencies at a maximum, but also reduce the number of pseudo fundamental frequency points caused by noise and other factors. Secondly in the melody selection stage, the contours formed by the obtained fundamental frequencies are grouped based on the multi-octave relation and the contour length. For the contours with a multi-octave relation, to reduce the errors caused by the octave problem, the only candidate contour is selected according to the salience and amplitude of the pitch points in each frame of each group. These contours are then merged with the contours without multi-octave relations. Subsequently, the main melody line of each frame is again determined by the salience of pitch points, and is corrected according to the pitch interval progression relation. Some evaluation experiments are carried out to analyze the proposed method, and the experimental results show that the performance of the proposed method is better.