Pitch Of Tone Research Articles

The relationship between acoustic and musical pitch processing in adolescents.

Amusia is defined as a difficulty processing the tonal pitch structure of music such that an individual cannot tell the difference between notes that are in-key and out-of-key. A fine-grained pitch discrimination deficit is often observed in people with amusia. It is possible that an intervention, early in development, could mitigate amusia; however, one challenge identifying amusia early in development is that identifying in- and out-of-key notes is a metacognitive task. Given the common co-occurrence of difficulties with pitch discrimination, it would be easier to identify amusia in developing children by using a pitch change detection task. The goal of this study was to explore the behavioural and neurophysiological profiles of adolescents with poor pitch processing (Poor PP) abilities compared with those with normal pitch processing (Normal PP) abilities. Neurophysiologically, the Poor PPs exhibited a similar event-related potential (ERP) profile to adult amusics during both acoustic and musical pitch discrimination tasks. That is, early ERPs (ERAN, MMN) were similar in Poor PPs compared with Normal PPs, whereas late positivities (P300, P600) were absent in Poor PPs, but present in Normal PPs. At the same time, behavioural data revealed a double dissociation between the abilities to detect a pitch deviant in acoustic and musical context, suggesting that about a third of the children would be missed by selecting a fine-grained acoustic pitch discrimination task to identify the presence of amusia in early childhood.

Verse and Prose: Linguistic Peculiarities and Their Functions

The article describes stable linguistic regularities which differentiate verse from prose. They are typical of verse in different languages and historical periods, they belong to different systems of versification, literary trends and indi-
 vidual styles. The most regular linguistic mechanisms in verse show the same general peculiarity – they hinder comprehension of logic in a text. A number of coordinating clauses grows while number of subordinate ones decreases in a verse
 in comparison with prose of the same author. The tonal pitch frame of a verse becomes two or three times narrower than in prose, that is why verse is twice or thrice more monotonous than prose. The fact that specific verse intonation does exist is proved by the experiment where informants could differentiate verse and prose only by intonation. Informants were offered to listen to a delexicalized verse and prose texts (where recording of verse reading was processed in such a way that only basic frequency
 remained audible) and they easily differentiated verse from prose for both classical verse (by A. Blok) and free verse (by M. Kuzmin). In addition, the article describes other mechanisms associated with lexical and text semantics. A hypothesis is suggested that all mechanisms applied in a verse activate imaginative thinking
 and hamper logical and critical thinking.

The role of response set overlap for flexibility and cognitive control in auditory multitasking

We developed a new variant of auditory task-switching in order to systematically investigate shifting and cognitive control in auditory task-switching and their relation to motor response overlap in a comprehensive way. In two experiments, participants classified either pitch or loudness of a simple tone as either low or high, hence, both tasks were constructed around a common underlying dimension ranging from low to high. In Experiment 1, response sets overlapped in both category and motor modality (both manual), whereas each task was related to a specific response category and motor response modality (manual vs. vocal) in Experiment 2. The data revealed reliable switch costs that were, contrary to our expectations, not reduced with reduced response set overlap. In addition, we found reliable congruency effects and their sequential modulation in both experiments with manual as well as vocal responses, and in the absence of competing motor activation (i.e., without motor response overlap). Congruency effects after auditory task switches were smaller when response sets did not overlap. Our data thus provides an important empirical generalization of known effects to auditory stimuli as well as with both manual and vocal responses. In addition, we demonstrated that reduced congruency effects after switches for non-overlapping response sets were due to the extent of overlap between different response sets in task-switching.

Attenuation of auditory N2 for self-modulated tones during continuous actions

Event-related potentials elicited by tones generated by one’s own discrete actions (e.g., button presses) are attenuated compared to those elicited by tones generated externally. The present study investigated whether ERP attenuation would occur when the timing or pitch of tones is modulated by continuous actions, as for such actions, a weak association between actions and their auditory consequences is assumed. In a modulation condition, participants modulated the time interval between tones (Experiment 1) or the pitch of tones (Experiment 2) by turning a steering wheel. In a listening condition, participants listened to the same tones as in the modulation condition without any action. The results revealed that the amplitude of N2 elicited by tones decreased in the modulation compared to listening conditions, consistently in the two experiments, suggesting relatively higher-order auditory processing can be mainly influenced by the prediction of action consequences when continuous actions modulate features of auditory stimuli.

Hippocampal CA1 Neurons Represent Positive Feedback During the Learning Process of an Associative Memory Task.

The hippocampus is crucial for forming associations between environmental stimuli. However, it is unclear how neural activities of hippocampal neurons dynamically change during the learning process. To address this question, we developed an associative memory task for rats with auditory stimuli. In this task, the rats were required to associate tone pitches (high and low) and ports (right and left) to obtain a reward. We recorded the firing activity of neurons in rats hippocampal CA1 during the learning process of the task. As a result, many hippocampal CA1 neurons increased their firing rates when the rats received a reward after choosing either the left or right port. We referred to these cells as “reward-direction cells.” Furthermore, the proportion of the reward-direction cells increased in the middle-stage of learning but decreased after the completion of learning. This result suggests that the activity of reward-direction cells might serve as “positive feedback” signal that facilitates the formation of associations between tone pitches and port choice.

Active Masking of Tonal Noise using Motor-Based Acoustic Generator to Improve EV Sound Quality

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Electric motor whine is one of the main noise sources of electric vehicles (EVs). Without engine masking noise, high pitch tonal noise from electric motor can be highly annoying and raise sound quality issues for electrified propulsion systems. This paper describes a patented new technology that controls electric motor to actively mask annoying high-pitch tonal noise by (i) controlling electric motor to create complementary low order tones to enrich sound complexity and distract high pitch tones; (ii) controlling motor to generate random dithering noise to raise masking noise floor and reduce tone-to-noise ratio around tonal targets; (iii) combining complementary injection at low frequency and dithering at high frequency for enhanced masking. This new technology enables controlling masking noise level, frequency, order and bandwidth as a function of motor torque and speed for most effective masking. The new active masking technology is successfully implemented and validated using GM’s Bolt EV in motor dyno and vehicle cabin noise tests. Jury tests are performed that confirm enhanced EV sound quality with slight impact on motor torque and efficiency.</div></div>

Disease Prediction using Voice Analysis

Researchers enlist Machine learning a viable solution to find vocal patterns. Our believe is voice can relay key information about personnel health and, our research proposes working towards medical diagnosis and disease risk through voice analysis. In next few years, to the advent of technology in medical science, we positively believe health conditions will be diagnosed using smartphones and another wearable technology. This paper aims to propose viable techniques to researchers that will work by recording short speech samples and analyzing for underlying diseases. For psychiatric disorders particularly, there are no blood samples and patients are often embarrassed to talk about facing mental health issues therefore, voice analysis can also be used over here to identify peculiar traits. Different countries are collecting voice analysis samples to test their tone pitch, rhythm, rate, and volume for sign of prediction like PTSD and other brain injuries and depression. Using Machine learning algorithms will help identify vocal patterns of personnel suffering diseases or any other conditions by comparing data with healthy individuals’ voice samples.

The Lightness/Pitch Crossmodal Correspondence Modulates the Rubin Face/Vase Perception.

We examine whether crossmodal correspondences (CMCs) modulate perceptual disambiguation by considering the influence of lightness/pitch congruency on the perceptual resolution of the Rubin face/vase (RFV). We randomly paired a black-and-white RFV (black faces and white vase, or vice versa) with either a high or low pitch tone and found that CMC congruency biases the dominant visual percept. The perceptual option that was CMC-congruent with the tone (white/high pitch or black/low pitch) was reported significantly more often than the perceptual option CMC-incongruent with the tone (white/low pitch or black/high pitch). However, the effect was only observed for stimuli presented for longer and not shorter durations suggesting a perceptual effect rather than a response bias, and moreover, we infer an effect on perceptual reversals rather than initial percepts. We found that the CMC congruency effect for longer-duration stimuli only occurred after prior exposure to the stimuli of several minutes, suggesting that the CMC congruency develops over time. These findings extend the observed effects of CMCs from relatively low-level feature-based effects to higher-level object-based perceptual effects (specifically, resolving ambiguity) and demonstrate that an entirely new category of crossmodal factors (CMC congruency) influence perceptual disambiguation in bistability.

Agostino Di Scipio and Dario Sanfilippo: Machine Milieu

Agostino Di Scipio and Dario Sanfilippo: Machine Milieu

Longer Cochlear Implant Experience Leads to Better Production of Mandarin Tones for Early Implanted Children.

Children with cochlear implants (CIs) face challenges in acquiring tones, since CIs do not transmit pitch information effectively. It has been suggested that longer CI experience provides additional benefits for children implanted early, enabling them to achieve language abilities similar to that of normal-hearing (NH) children (Colletti 2009). Mandarin is a tonal language with four lexical tones and a neutral tone (T0), characterized by distinct pitch and durational patterns. It has been suggested that early implantation (i.e., before 2 years) greatly benefits the acquisition of Mandarin tones by children with CIs (Tang et al. 2019c). In this study, we extend those findings to investigate the effect of CI experience on the acquisition of Mandarin tones for children implanted early. We asked the extent to which they were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns of both lexical tones and T0 as a function of CI experience, and the extent to which their tonal productions were acoustically like that of NH children. Forty-four NH 3-year olds and 28 children implanted with CIs between 1 and 2 years, aged 3 to 7, were recruited. The children with CIs were grouped according to the length of CI experience: 3 to 6 years, 2 to 3 years, and 1 to 2 years. Lexical tone and T0 productions were elicited using a picture-naming task. Tonal productions from the children with CIs were acoustically analyzed and compared with those from the NH children. Children with 3 to 6 years of CI experience were able to produce distinct pitch and durational patterns for both lexical tones and T0, with NH-like acoustic realizations. Children with 2 to 3 years of CI experience were also able to produce the expected tonal patterns, although their productions were not yet NH-like. Those with only 1 to 2 years of CI experience, however, were not yet able to produce the distinct acoustic patterns for either lexical tones or T0. These results provide acoustic evidence demonstrating that, when Mandarin-speaking children are implanted before the age of 2, only those with 3 to 6 years of experience were able to produce NH-like tones, including both lexical tone and T0. Children with shorter CI experience (less than 3 years) were unable to produce distinct acoustic patterns for the different tones. This suggests that at least 3 years of CI experience is still needed for early implanted children to acquire tonal distinctions similar to those of NH 3-year olds.

Higher-Order Musical Temporal Structure in Bird Song.

Bird songs often display musical acoustic features such as tonal pitch selection, rhythmicity, and melodic contouring. We investigated higher-order musical temporal structure in bird song using an experimental method called “music scrambling” with human subjects. Recorded songs from a phylogenetically diverse group of 20 avian taxa were split into constituent elements (“notes” or “syllables”) and recombined in original and random order. Human subjects were asked to evaluate which version sounded more “musical” on a per-species basis. Species identity and stimulus treatment were concealed from subjects, and stimulus presentation order was randomized within and between taxa. Two recordings of human music were included as a control for attentiveness. Participants varied in their assessments of individual species musicality, but overall they were significantly more likely to rate bird songs with original temporal sequence as more musical than those with randomized temporal sequence. We discuss alternative hypotheses for the origins of avian musicality, including honest signaling, perceptual bias, and arbitrary aesthetic coevolution.

The perception of octave pitch affinity and harmonic fusion have a common origin

Musicians say that the pitches of tones with a frequency ratio of 2:1 (one octave) have a distinctive affinity, even if the tones do not have common spectral components. It has been suggested, however, that this affinity judgment has no biological basis and originates instead from an acculturation process ‒ the learning of musical rules unrelated to auditory physiology. We measured, in young amateur musicians, the perceptual detectability of octave mistunings for tones presented alternately (melodic condition) or simultaneously (harmonic condition). In the melodic condition, mistuning was detectable only by means of explicit pitch comparisons. In the harmonic condition, listeners could use a different and more efficient perceptual cue: in the absence of mistuning, the tones fused into a single sound percept; mistunings decreased fusion. Performance was globally better in the harmonic condition, in line with the hypothesis that listeners used a fusion cue in this condition; this hypothesis was also supported by results showing that an illusory simultaneity of the tones was much less advantageous than a real simultaneity. In the two conditions, mistuning detection was generally better for octave compressions than for octave stretchings. This asymmetry varied across listeners, but crucially the listener-specific asymmetries observed in the two conditions were highly correlated. Thus, the perception of the melodic octave appeared to be closely linked to the phenomenon of harmonic fusion. As harmonic fusion is thought to be determined by biological factors rather than factors related to musical culture or training, we argue that octave pitch affinity also has, at least in part, a biological basis.

Adopting StudyIntonation CAPT Tools to Tonal Languages Through the Example of Vietnamese

In tonal languages, tones are associated with both and phonological and lexical domains. Accurate tone articulation is required in order to convey the correct meaning. Learning tones at both word and phrase levels is often challenging for L2 learners with non-tonal language background, because of possible subtle difference between the close tones. In this paper, we discuss an adoption of StudyIntonation CAPT tools to the case of Vietnamese language being a good example of register tonal language with a complex system of tones comprising such features as tone pitch, its length, contour melody, intensity and phonation. The particular focus of this contribution is to assess the adoption of StudyIntonation course toolkit and its pitch processing and visualization algorithms in order to evaluate how the combined use of audio and visual perception mechanisms supported by StudyIntonation may help learners to improve the accuracy of their pronunciation and intonation with respect to tonal languages.

A brief outline of the typological features of the Yoruba language

The article presents materials on the phonetic and grammatical structure of Yoruba – one of the most widely spoken languages of West Africa, which, along with its literary form, exists in many dialectical variants. Using examples selected from modern normative speech usage, the author – a native speaker of the Standard Yoruba – demonstrates the ways of expressing semantic content, various grammatical meanings and categories in the Yoruba language, whose structure has significant differences from known modern analytical (English, French) and synthetic (Russian) languages of Europe. The results of the study show that, first, lexical meanings in Yoruba language can be differentiated by changing tone pitch; second, reduplication and agglutination are vital to the process of word formation; third, the categories of verb tense, definiteness / indeterminacy, comparative and superlative adjectives are expressed by lexical means; finally, syntactic constructions due to the non-inflectional nature of words in Yoruba, as in European analytical languages, are constructed according to a fixed model.

N100m latency shortening caused by selective attention

The N100m response to a specific same-sound stimulus may be altered by the degree of attention paid to the stimulus. When participants selectively pay attention to the stimulus, the N100m amplitude increases; however, minimal effects are observed on the N100m latency. In this study, we examined the effects of selective special attention (motivation) to extract the frequency (or pitch) information from a probe tone on the N100m response to the probe tone. We compared the N100m latencies and amplitudes using magnetoencephalography, with the following three experimental conditions: 1) vocalization task protocol (vocalize in tune with the pitch of the probe tone after the presentation of the probe tone), 2) hearing task protocol (just listen to the probe tone), and 3) imagining (just imagine the vocalization in tune with the probe tone). The results indicated that the N100m latency in response to the probe tone was significantly shortened in the vocalization and imagining tasks compared with the hearing task in the right hemisphere of the brain. The amplitude was significantly increased in the vocalization task compared with the imagining and hearing tasks in the right hemisphere, and in the vocalization task compared with the hearing task in the left hemisphere of the brain; that is, the attention and/or motivation required to extract the information from the stimulus tones may have caused N100m latency shortening. To our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that the N100m latency may be shortened under particular attentional conditions in response to a simple tone.

Does a pitch rating method converge on the frequencies within tonal stimuli?

This study determined how well the "perceived spectrum," estimated using a pitch similarity rating method, reflected the spectrum and pitch of seven different tonal sounds. The perceived spectrum well-matched the acoustic spectrum for pure tones ranging from 1 to 12 kHz, it also matched the broad frequency range for two complex tones with periodicity pitches of 1 and 2 kHz, but it did not reflect the pitch of the complex tones. These results suggest that while this method may not measure the pitch of sounds, it may be useful for measuring the general perceived frequency range of sounds.

Automaticity of facial attractiveness perception and sex-specific mating strategies

The current literature shows mixed results regarding whether the perception of facial attractiveness is automatic, i.e. that it operates independently from attentional resources. We argue that an evolutionary perspective on mating strategies provides a comprehensive account of the findings. In two studies, we used the locus-of-slack logic in a psychological refractory period paradigm. 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 on two difficulty levels. Male and female participants judged the attractiveness of opposite-sex faces (Study 1, n = 73) or same-sex faces (Study 2, n = 94) in this paradigm. Results indicate that men do not need attentional resources when processing female faces (Study 1), but require attentional resources when processing same-sex faces (Study 2). In contrast, women need attentional resources to process the attractiveness of opposite as well as same-sex faces.

Change in the Neural Response to Auditory Deviance Following Cognitive Therapy for Hallucinations in Patients With Schizophrenia.

Adjunctive psychotherapeutic approaches recommended for patients with schizophrenia (SZ) who are fully or partially resistant to pharmacotherapy have rarely utilized biomarkers to enhance the understanding of treatment-effective mechanisms. As SZ patients with persistent auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) frequently evidence reduced neural responsiveness to external auditory stimulation, which may impact cognitive and functional outcomes, this study examined the effects of cognitive behavioral therapy for voices (CBTv) on clinical and AVH symptoms and the sensory processing of auditory deviants as measured with the electroencephalographically derived mismatch negativity (MMN) response. Twenty-four patients with SZ and AVH were randomly assigned to group CBTv treatment or a treatment as usual (TAU) condition. Patients in the group CBTv condition received treatment for 5 months while the matched control patients received TAU for the same period, followed by 5 months of group CBTv. Assessments were conducted at baseline and at the end of treatment. Although not showing consistent changes in the frequency of AVHs, CBTv (vs. TAU) improved patients' appraisal (p = 0.001) of and behavioral/emotional responses to AVHs, and increased both MMN generation (p = 0.001) and auditory cortex current density (p = 0.002) in response to tone pitch deviants. Improvements in AVH symptoms were correlated with change in pitch deviant MMN and current density in left primary auditory cortex. These findings of improved auditory information processing and symptom-response attributable to CBTv suggest potential clinical and functional benefits of psychotherapeutical approaches for patients with persistent AVHs.

How musical experience affects tone perception efficiency by musicians of tonal and non-tonal speakers?

PurposeTo investigate if, regardless of language background (tonal or non-tonal), musicians may show stronger CP than non-musicians; To examine if native speakers of English (English or non-tonal musicians henceforth) or Mandarin Chinese (Mandarin or tonal musicians henceforth) can better accommodate multiple functions of the same acoustic cue and if musicians’ sensitivity to pitch of lexical tones comes at the cost of slower processing.MethodEnglish and Mandarin Musicians and non-musicians performed a categorical identification and a discrimination task on rising and falling continua of fundamental frequency on two vowels with 9 duration values.ResultsNon-tonal musicians exhibited significantly stronger categorical perception of pitch contour than non-tonal non-musicians. However, tonal musicians did not consistently perceive the two types of pitch directions more categorically than tonal non-musicians. Both tonal and non-tonal musicians also benefited more from increasing stimulus duration in processing pitch changes than non-musicians and they generally require less time for pitch processing. Musicians were also more sensitive to intrinsic F0 in pitch perception and differences of pitch types.ConclusionThe effect of musical training strengthens categorical perception more consistently in non-tonal speakers than tonal speakers. Overall, musicians benefit more from increased stimulus duration, due perhaps to their greater sensitivity to temporal information, thus allowing them to be better at forming a more robust auditory representation and matching sounds to internalized memory templates. Musicians also attended more to acoustic details such as intrinsic F0 and pitch types in pitch processing, and yet, overall, their categorization of pitch was not compromised by traces of these acoustic details from their auditory short-term working memory. These findings may lead to a better understanding of pitch perception deficits in special populations, particularly among individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

영월 방언의 거성형과 성조 변화

이 연구는 영월 방언 체언의 성조를 분석하고 약 30년이라는 시간차를 두고 거성형의 성조 실형을 비교하여 영월 방언 성조 변화를 설명하고자 했다. 그 결과, 영월 방언의 성조체계는 두 가지 성조 변화가 진행중임을 확인할 수 있었다. 하나는 성조체계 내에 영향을 주지 않는 단순한 음성 변화이고 다른 하나는 성조형 분포의 변화로 말미암아 성조체계 내에 재구조화가 일어나는 변화이다.<BR> 먼저, 단순한 음성 변화는 평복형과 상성형의 음조 변화이다. 최명옥(1999)의 자료에서는 평복형과 상성형의 음조는 어절의 둘째음절과 셋째음절에 어절에서 가장 높은 고조 [H]가 실현되었다. 그러나 30년 후인 현재 자료에서는 평복형과 상성형의 음조는 어절 끝에서 둘째음절에 어절에서 가장 높은 고조 [H]가 실현되었다.<BR> 다음, 영월 방언 성조체계 내에 재구조화를 촉발하는 성조형 분포의 변화이다. 30년 전 자료에서는 거성형이 분포의 제약 없이 안정적인 성조 실현을 보인다. 하지만, 현재 필자의 자료에서는 거성형이 매우 불안정한 성조 실현을 보인다. 즉, 영월 방언 거성형은 3음절 이상 어절에서 평2형(□□, □□ · □)에 합류해서 거성형이 존재하지 않고, ‘·말(斗)/M/[Mˉ ]’과 같이 1음절 단독형과 ‘·춤·이/M²/[HH]’처럼 2음절 어절에서도 첫소리가 강자음으로 시작하는 단어에서만 실현된다. 결국, 성조형 분포의 변화로 인해서 2음절 어절에서 거성형은 A유형(·춤·이/M²/[HH]), B유형(·풀·이/M²/[HH]~풀이/H²/[MH]), C유형(물이/H²/[MH]) 등이 공존한다.