Pitch Judgments Research Articles

Perception of facial attractiveness requires some attentional resources: implications for the “automaticity” of psychological adaptations

Traditional criteria for modularity assert that perceptual adaptations for processing evolutionarily important stimuli should operate “automatically” in the sense of requiring no central attentional resources. Here, we test the validity of this automaticity criterion by assessing the attentional demands of a well-studied perceptual adaptation: judgment of facial attractiveness. We used locus-of-slack logic in a dual-task psychological refractory period paradigm, where Task 1 was a speeded judgment of tone pitch (low vs. high), and Task 2 was a speeded judgment of whether a face was attractive or unattractive, with the Task-2 judgment manipulated to have a low or a high difficulty level. In two studies (N=36 and N=73 female participants; 384 trials each), the Task 2 difficulty effects were additive with stimulus-onset asynchronies (100, 300, 500 or 900 ms) on Task 2 response times. According to the locus-of-slack logic, this result implies that participants could not discriminate facial attractiveness level, while their central attentional resources were still occupied by Task 1. If the human capacity for perceiving facial attractiveness—a premier example of an adaptation—does not show automaticity in this sense, automaticity may not be a useful criterion for identifying psychological adaptations.

Perceptual grouping affects pitch judgments across time and frequency.

Pitch, the perceptual correlate of fundamental frequency (F0), plays an important role in speech, music, and animal vocalizations. Changes in F0 over time help define musical melodies and speech prosody, while comparisons of simultaneous F0 are important for musical harmony, and for segregating competing sound sources. This study compared listeners' ability to detect differences in F0 between pairs of sequential or simultaneous tones that were filtered into separate, nonoverlapping spectral regions. The timbre differences induced by filtering led to poor F0 discrimination in the sequential, but not the simultaneous, conditions. Temporal overlap of the two tones was not sufficient to produce good performance; instead performance appeared to depend on the two tones being integrated into the same perceptual object. The results confirm the difficulty of comparing the pitches of sequential sounds with different timbres and suggest that, for simultaneous sounds, pitch differences may be detected through a decrease in perceptual fusion rather than an explicit coding and comparison of the underlying F0s.

Effects of Clock Monitoring on Electroencephalographic Activity

Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded while participants waited to make spontaneous key-press movements (Experiment 1) or waited for tones in a pitch judgment task (Experiment 2). In one condition of each experiment, participants also had to report the position of a spot traveling on a clock at the crucial time point (i.e., when they decided to move or when the tone was presented), mimicking a procedure used to assess the time of conscious awareness of an event of interest. In a second condition, there was no clock or temporal judgment. Average EEG activity preceding key presses was substantially different when participants had to monitor the clock than when they did not. Smaller clock-related differences in average EEG activity were also present preceding tone onsets. The effects of clock monitoring on EEG activity could be responsible for previous reports that movement-related brain activity begins before participants have consciously decided to move (e.g., Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983).

Harmonic pitch: Dependence on resolved partials, spectral edges, and combination tones

Perceptual weights were estimated in a pitch-comparison experiment to assess the relative influences of individual partial tones on listeners’ pitch judgments. The stimuli were harmonic sounds ( F 0 = 200 Hz ) with partials up to the 12th. Low-numbered partials were removed step-by-step, so that the remaining higher-numbered partials would have a better chance of showing any effect. The individual frequencies of the partials were perturbed randomly on each stimulus presentation, and weights were estimated as the correlation coefficients between the frequency perturbations and the listeners’ responses. When the harmonic sounds contained all twelve partials, the listeners depended mostly on the low-numbered, resolved partials within the well-established dominance region. As the low-numbered partials were taken out of the dominance region, the listeners mostly listened to the lowest and highest partials at the spectral edges. For one listener, such an edge-listening strategy took the form of relying on nonlinear combination tones. Overall, there was no indication of any influence on pitch from unresolved partials, thus no evidence of contribution to pitch from temporal cues carried by this group of partials. The estimated patterns of weights were well described by the predictions of Goldstein’s optimal-processor model. The predicted weights were inversely proportional to the amount of error for estimating the individual frequencies of the partials. The agreement between the predicted and measured weights suggests that, for harmonic sounds, partials whose frequencies are perceived with the best precision will likely have the greatest influence on perceived pitch.

Effect of stimulus level and place of stimulation on temporal pitch perception by cochlear implant users

Three experiments studied the effect of pulse rate on temporal pitch perception by cochlear implant users. Experiment 1 measured rate discrimination for pulse trains presented in bipolar mode to either an apical, middle, or basal electrode and for standard rates of 100 and 200 pps. In each block of trials the signals could have a level of -0.35, 0, or +0.35 dB re the standard, and performance for each signal level was recorded separately. Signal level affected performance for just over half of the combinations of subject, electrode, and standard rate studied. Performance was usually, but not always, better at the higher signal level. Experiment 2 showed that, for a given subject and condition, the direction of the effect was similar in monopolar and bipolar mode. Experiment 3 employed a pitch comparison procedure without feedback, and showed that the signal levels in experiment 1 that produced the best performance for a given subject and condition also led to the signal having a higher pitch. It is concluded that small level differences can have a robust and substantial effect on pitch judgments and argue that these effects are not entirely due to response biases or to co-variation of place-of-excitation with level.

Verbal memory retrieval engages visual cortex in musicians

As one major line of research on brain plasticity, many imaging studies have been conducted to identify the functional and structural reorganization associated with musical expertise. Based on previous behavioral research, the present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of superior verbal memory performance in musicians. Participants with and without musical training performed a verbal memory task to first encode a list of words auditorily delivered and then silently recall as many words as possible. They performed in separate blocks a control task involving pure tone pitch judgment. Post-scan recognition test showed better memory performance in musicians than non-musicians. During memory retrieval, the musicians showed significantly greater activations in bilateral though left-lateralized visual cortex relative to the pitch judgment baseline. In comparison, no such visual cortical activations were found in the non-musicians. No group differences were observed during the encoding stage. The results echo a previous report of visual cortical activation during verbal memory retrieval in the absence of any visual sensory stimulation in the blind population, who are also known to possess superior verbal memory. It is suggested that the visual cortex can be recruited to serve as extra memory resources and contributes to the superior verbal memory in special situations. While in the blind population, such cross-modal functional reorganization may be induced by sensory deprivation; in the musicians it may be induced by the long-term and demanding nature of musical training to use as much available neural resources as possible.

The Shape of Nuclear Falls and their Effect on the Perception of Pitch and Prominence: Peaks vs. Plateaux

This article investigates the perceptual effect of a high plateau in the intonation contour. Plateaux are flat stretches of contour and have been observed associated with high tones in Standard Southern British (SSB) English. The hypothesis that plateaux may make the accents with which they are associated sound higher in pitch than sharp peaks of the same maximum frequency is tested experimentally. In the first experiment listeners heard pairs of resynthesized utterances where the nuclear accent differed only in shape, not frequency. They indicated which stimulus they thought contained the higher pitched accent. Results showed that plateau-shaped accents sound higher than peaks. In the second experiment the effect of a plateau on prominence relations within an utterance is investigated. Listeners heard resynthesized sentences, and compared two accents. One group indicated which accent sounded higher in pitch and the other indicated which sounded more prominent. Results again indicated that plateau-shaped accents sound higher in pitch and also more prominent; judgments of pitch and prominence were very similar to one another. The results from both experiments indicated that accent shape is a perceptually important variable, although such a fine level of detail is not taken into account by autosegmental-metrical theories of intonation.

Perceptual context effects of speech and nonspeech sounds: The role of auditory categories

Williams [(1986). "Role of dynamic information in the perception of coarticulated vowels," Ph.D. thesis, University of Connecticut, Standford, CT] demonstrated that nonspeech contexts had no influence on pitch judgments of nonspeech targets, whereas context effects were obtained when instructed to perceive the sounds as speech. On the other hand, Holt et al. [(2000). "Neighboring spectral content influences vowel identification," J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 710-722] showed that nonspeech contexts were sufficient to elicit context effects in speech targets. The current study was to test a hypothesis that could explain the varying effectiveness of nonspeech contexts: Context effects are obtained only when there are well-established perceptual categories for the target stimuli. Experiment 1 examined context effects in speech and nonspeech signals using four series of stimuli: steady-state vowels that perceptually spanned from /inverted ohm/-/I/ in isolation and in the context of /w/ (with no steady-state portion) and two nonspeech sine-wave series that mimicked the acoustics of the speech series. In agreement with previous work context effects were obtained for speech contexts and targets but not for nonspeech analogs. Experiment 2 tested predictions of the hypothesis by testing for nonspeech context effects after the listeners had been trained to categorize the sounds. Following training, context-dependent categorization was obtained for nonspeech stimuli in the training group. These results are presented within a general perceptual-cognitive framework for speech perception research.

Dial A440 for absolute pitch: Absolute pitch memory by non-absolute pitch possessors

Listeners without absolute (or "perfect") pitch have difficulty identifying or producing isolated musical pitches from memory. Instead, they process the relative pattern of pitches, which remains invariant across pitch transposition. Musically untrained non-absolute pitch possessors demonstrated absolute pitch memory for the telephone dial tone, a stimulus that is always heard at the same absolute frequency. Listeners accurately classified pitch-shifted versions of the dial tone as "normal," "higher than normal" or "lower than normal." However, the role of relative pitch processing was also evident, in that listeners' pitch judgments were also sensitive to the frequency range of stimuli.

Dominance region for pitch at low fundamental frequencies: Implications for pitch theories

The dominant region for pitch was measured for complex tones with low fundamental frequency (F0=35 and 50 Hz). The tones contained 59 harmonics, added in cosine or random phase. The harmonics were split into two groups; group A containing harmonics 1-K and group B containing harmonics (K+1)-N. On each trial, two successive complex tones were presented. In one, the harmonics in group A were shifted down by deltaF0 and the harmonics in group B were shifted up by deltaF0. In the other tone, the shifts were in the opposite direction. The tones were presented in random order and the subject had to indicate which had the higher pitch. The pitch judgements followed the components in group B for small K and the components in group A for large K. The frequency corresponding to the middle of the transition region was taken as the center of the dominant region, fdom. The value of fdom varied markedly across subjects but typically corresponded to harmonic numbers above the 6th, for both phase conditions. Thus, the dominant harmonics were unresolved. These results indicate that resolution of individual harmonics is not the key factor determining the location of the dominant region. [Work supported by the MRC.]

Pitch perception in electric and acoustic hearing

In normal hearing (NH), timing and place-of-excitation cues to pitch are usually inextricably linked. In contrast, by varying the temporal pattern of electrical pulses applied to one channel of a cochlear implant (CI), researchers can investigate the usefulness and limitations of purely temporal cues to pitch. A related technique, which often produces very similar results, is to present NH listeners with trains of acoustic pulses that have been passed through a fixed bandpass filter so as to remove place cues. Furthermore, one can then measure how these temporal patterns are represented in the auditory nerve (AN) by recording, respectively, the electrically and acoustically evoked compound action potential. These physiological measures can then be compared to listeners’ pitch judgements to the same stimuli. We have used this approach to show how AN refractory effects can influence pitch, to evaluate competing pitch models, and to show how a code based on first-order intervals can provide a level-independent representation of pitch. We have also examined the possible basis for the relatively poor pitch perception of CI users, particularly at pulse rates above about 300 pps. [Work supported by RNID.]

Motor and Perceptual Timing Deficits Among Survivors of Childhood Leukemia

There is growing evidence of cerebellar-frontal system change in children treated for leukemia with chemotherapy alone (Lesnik et al., 1998). We compared 22 long-term survivors of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), aged 8-18, to 22 age- and gender-matched controls on tasks emphasizing cerebellar-frontal functioning including judgment of time duration and motor timing. Groups were also compared on a judgment of pitch task, used as a control measure. Children with ALL were at least 5 years from diagnosis, treated with intrathecal chemotherapy (methotrexate in all, hydrocortisone and cytarabine in 20/22), but not radiation therapy, and free from recurrence of disease. After controlling for IQ, the ALL group had poorer performance than controls on judgment of long duration and motor timing, but not judgment of pitch. Treatment with intrathecal and infusional chemotherapy for childhood ALL may be associated with skill deficits comparable to those seen in individuals with cerebellar-frontal abnormalities.

Aging Artists’ Creativity

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On the factors for detecting mistuned conditions and guiding their corrections for the Koto tuning

By observations at the Koto tuning practice, it is realized that the bridge is moved in the period of about 400 ms, which is too short to feel the sensation of beat. Then, two kinds of listening tests were planned. The test sounds composed of two Koto sounds which should be tuned in one octave interval were presented at the same time like a part of actual Koto tuning process. The lower tone was at 196.9 Hz, the pitch of the higher one was varied in the range of 20 cents. Their length from the beginning was varied from 50 to 500 ms. The first experiment is for the judgment of the right or wrong tuning (higher or lower). The second one is for the tone color impression using 13 pairs of adjectives. The results of these experiments show that reasonable pitch judgments can be done for the test sounds longer than 200 ms by well‐experienced Koto players, and the test sounds are clearly distinguished from each other by their tone color difference, whereupon in the Koto tuning by expert players, the direction and degree of mistuning are found to be judged at the initial stage of Koto sounds by the tone color impression.

Is the Bandwidth for Timbre Invariance Only One Octave?

Timbre invariance refers to the ability to determine whether two notes at different pitches were played or sung by the same instrument or voice. Handel and Erickson (2001) reported that nonmusician listeners heard pairs of notes as coming uniformly from different instruments when the pitches were separated by an octave or more; they concluded that the bandwidth of timbre invariance was only one octave. Here we replicate that study with methodological refinements and include musicians as well as nonmusicians. We presented listeners with pairs of notes from two instruments (horn and bassoon) spanning a 2.5 octave range, and listeners judged whether two notes were the same pitch and produced by the same instrument. Nonmusicians replicated Handel and Erickson’s result of a decline in timbre invariance beyond 1.0 octave, whereas musicians’ performance declined less—to about 80% correct at 2.5 octave. Pitch judgments did not vary across the range and were more accurate for musicians than for nonmusicians. The difference between musicians and nonmusicians in timbre judgments suggests caution in stating a range for the operation of timbre invariance.

Miniseminar: Vocal Fold Medialization: Injection Versus Thyroplasty?

Medialization laryngoplasty restores voice in patients with unilateral laryngeal paralysis. Of question was whether patients with vocal fold paralysis resulting from cancer or its treatment had as good a post-operative voice result as patients with vocal fold paralysis of benign etiology. The purpose of the present study was to compare post-operative perceptual, acoustic, aerodynamic, and quality of life data in these two patient groups. Twenty-eight patients with vocal fold paralysis secondary to malignancy or its treatment were age and gender-matched with patients with paralysis resulting from benign origin. Pre- and post-operative perceptual judgments of pitch, loudness and quality were rated independently by two speech–language pathologists. A digital audiotape of the patient's voice was analyzed using Soundscope software. Fundamental frequency, conversational intensity and perturbation were evaluated. Glottal flow rates in propositional speech, phonation times and extent of pitch and loudness ranges were also measured. Three quality of life surveys, the Short Form-36 general health survey, the Voice Handicap Index, and the Voice Outcomes Study were administered. Results of voice testing indicated that perceptual, acoustic and aerodynamic data were significantly improved 3 months after thyroplasty in all patients regardless of whether they had a history of cancer. Quality of life data, however, distinguished the two groups. In particular, the general health measure found a significant difference in physical functioning and overall vitality, although satisfaction with improved voice was equally appreciated in both patient groups. Of clinical significance is that though general health may differ, patients with cancer-related laryngeal paralysis can expect to have as good a voice outcome following thyroplasty as patients with paralysis of benign etiology.

Right temporal cortex is critical for utilization of melodic contextual cues in a pitch constancy task.

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge the test tone. The present study assessed the role of the right auditory cortex in using tonal context for pitch judgements. Thirty-six patients with focal brain excisions of the right or left anterior temporal lobe (RT, LT) and 12 matched control participants (NC) made pitch judgements on complex tones that could differ in fundamental frequency and/or spectral shape. This task was performed in isolation and within a melodic context. The RT group showed impairments both on trials in which extraction of pitch from differing spectral shapes was required (different-timbre trials) and when this was not required (same-timbre trials). All groups performed poorly in the isolated condition, but improved with melodic context. Degree of improvement varied in that the LT group performed normally, whereas the RT group was not able to obtain the same amount of facilitation from the melodic context. In particular, melodic context did not facilitate the RT group's performance on different-timbre trials. Excisions within Heschl's gyrus did not affect these results, suggesting that the impairments were due to the removal of the anterior temporal cortex. The results of this study therefore implicate right anterior auditory cortical areas in making pitch judgements relative to tones that were heard previously. We propose that auditory association areas located on the anterior portion of the superior temporal gyrus, an area with connections to frontal regions implicated in working memory, could be involved in holding and integrating tonal information.

Place-pitch and excitation patterns in cochlear implant listeners

In cochlear implants (CIs), an electrode’s pitch is largely determined by the excitation pattern produced by stimulation. For CI users, is pitch perception most strongly influenced by the peak, edge or some intermediate location within the excitation pattern? By varying the stimulation mode at four evenly spaced electrode locations, four spectral profiles were hypothesized: single-peaked, apically weighted, basally weighted or multi-peaked (with an intermediate pitch). Forward-masked excitation patterns and pitch judgments were obtained for the four electrode locations, for all experimental stimulation modes, relative to a standard set of BP1 electrodes. Results showed individual differences in CI users’ excitation patterns and pitch judgments produced by the different stimulation modes. Most subjects’ pitch judgments were sensitive to single, sharp peaks in the excitation pattern; however, subjects differed in their sensitivity to broader, multi-peaked patterns. For widely spaced electrode configurations, some subjects consistently judged pitch according to the apical edge of stimulation, some to the basal edge and others to an intermediate location. For some electrode locations, varying the stimulation mode produced significantly different pitches and excitation patterns. Future speech processing strategies may wish to combine stimulation modes to improve the spectral resolution available with a fixed number of implanted electrodes.

Perceptual Dynamics of Circular Pitch

The convention of representing pitch and key relations within a geometric scheme has a long history. Such schemes often emphasize perceptual similarities or differences among tones or keys. In the present work, we focus on the dynamics of perception of pitch movement, within the framework of geometric models. In the first two experiments, perception of the pitch pattern of pairs of Shepard tones (R. N. Shepard, 1964) is examined in three different orderings: (1) random permutation of tone pairs, (2) sequential increases in the frequency components of the second tone of each pair, and (3) sequential decreases in the second tone's frequency components. Consistent with previous reports, when tone pairs are randomly permuted, the pitch pattern is equally likely to be judged as ascending or descending as the frequency difference between tones nears the half-octave. In the ordered conditions, the boundary between ascending and descending pitch is sensitive to the direction of frequency change such that hysteresis, or perceptual assimilation, is observed. In Experiment 3, we obtain pitch judgments of all two-tone permutations of Shepard tones of the chromatic scale, then map the judgments onto a toroidal stimulus space formed by the product of two pitch circles. Perceptual dynamics are explored by systematic excursions through the stimulus space. The results indicate that spatial models of pitch provide an incomplete description of the higher than/lower than pitch relationship in Shepard tones; also crucial is the path taken through the space defined by the stimuli.

Perception and Adjustment of Pitch in Inharmonic String Instrument Tones

The effect of inharmonicity on pitch was measured by listening tests at five fundamental frequencies. Inharmonicity was defined in a way typical of string instruments, such as the piano, where all partials are elevated in a systematic way. It was found that the pitch judgment is usually dominated by some other partial than the fundamental; however, with a high degree of inharmonicity the fundamental became important as well. Guidelines are given for compensating for the pitch difference between harmonic and inharmonic tones in digital sound synthesis.