Search results for "Pitch Perception"
showing 10 items of 31 documents
Amusic does not mean unmusical: Beat perception and synchronization ability despite pitch deafness
2013
Pitch deafness, the most commonly known form of congenital amusia, refers to a severe deficit in musical pitch processing (i.e., melody discrimination and recognition) that can leave time processing--including rhythm, metre, and "feeling the beat"--preserved. In Experiment 1, we show that by presenting musical excerpts in nonpitched drum timbres, rather than pitched piano tones, amusics show normal metre recognition. Experiment 2 reveals that body movement influences amusics' interpretation of the beat of an ambiguous drum rhythm. Experiment 3 and a subsequent exploratory study show an ability to synchronize movement to the beat of popular dance music and potential for improvement when give…
Evidence for a spatial bias in the perception of sequences of brief tones
2013
Listeners are unable to report the physical order of particular sequences of brief tones. This phenomenon of temporal dislocation depends on tone durations and frequencies. The current study empirically shows that it also depends on the spatial location of the tones. Dichotically testing a three-tone sequence showed that the central tone tends to be reported as the first or the last element when it is perceived as part of a left-to-right motion. Since the central-tone dislocation does not occur for right-to-left sequences of the same tones, this indicates that there is a spatial bias in the perception of sequences. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.
Measuring and modeling real-time responses to music: the dynamics of tonality induction.
2003
We examined a variety of real-time responses evoked by a single piece of music, the organ Duetto BWV 805 by J S Bach. The primary data came from a concurrent probe-tone method in which the probe-tone is sounded continuously with the music. Listeners judged how well the probe tone fit with the music at each point in time. The process was repeated for all probe tones of the chromatic scale. A self-organizing map (SOM) [Kohonen 1997 Self-organizing Maps (Berlin: Springer)] was used to represent the developing and changing sense of key reflected in these judgments. The SOM was trained on the probe-tone profiles for 24 major and minor keys (Krumhansl and Kessler 1982 Psychological Review89 334–…
Earlier timbre processing of instrumental tones compared to equally complex spectrally rotated sounds as revealed by the mismatch negativity.
2014
Harmonically rich sounds have been shown to be processed more efficiently by the human brain compared to single sinusoidal tones. To control for stimulus complexity as a potentially confounding factor, tones and equally complex spectrally rotated sounds, have been used in the present study to investigate the role of the overtone series in sensory auditory processing in non-musicians. Timbre differences in instrumental tones with equal pitch elicited a MMN which was earlier compared to that elicited by the spectrally rotated sounds, indicating that harmonically rich tones are processed faster compared to non-musical sounds without an overtone series, even when pitch is not the relevant infor…
The sound of music: differentiating musicians using a fast, musical multi-feature mismatch negativity paradigm.
2011
Abstract Musicians’ skills in auditory processing depend highly on instrument, performance practice, and on level of expertise. Yet, it is not known though whether the style/genre of music might shape auditory processing in the brains of musicians. Here, we aimed at tackling the role of musical style/genre on modulating neural and behavioral responses to changes in musical features. Using a novel, fast and musical sounding multi-feature paradigm, we measured the mismatch negativity (MMN), a pre-attentive brain response, to six types of musical feature change in musicians playing three distinct styles of music (classical, jazz, rock/pop) and in non-musicians. Jazz and classical musicians sco…
Sequential grouping modulates the effect of non-simultaneous masking on auditory intensity resolution.
2012
The presence of non-simultaneous maskers can result in strong impairment in auditory intensity resolution relative to a condition without maskers, and causes a complex pattern of effects that is difficult to explain on the basis of peripheral processing. We suggest that the failure of selective attention to the target tones is a useful framework for understanding these effects. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the sequential grouping of the targets and the maskers into separate auditory objects facilitates selective attention and therefore reduces the masker-induced impairment in intensity resolution. In Experiment 1, a condition favoring the processing of the maskers and the targ…
Pitch accent type affects the N400 during referential processing
2010
Discourse processing depends on semantic memory as well as maintaining and updating of a mental model. Using event-related potentials, we investigated how a referent's information status (new, accessible, given) is processed in combination with three different prosodic realizations (an appropriate accent and two inappropriate accents). The data reveal a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern, indicating that prosodic information affects an early discourse linking stage, during which prominence information reflecting a referent's accessibility is computed (N400), and a later discourse updating stage, during which conflicts between prosodic information and a referent's actual information statu…
Characteristics of tinnitus with or without hearing loss: Clinical observations in Sicilian tinnitus patients
2010
Objective: To analyze the clinical characteristics of tinnitus both in normal hearing subjects and in patients with hearing loss. Methods: The study considered 312 tinnitus sufferers, 176 males and 136 females, ranging from 21 to 83 years of age, who were referred to the Audiology Section of the Department of Bio-technology of Palermo University. The following parameters were considered: age, sex, hearing threshold, tinnitus laterality, tinnitus duration, tinnitus measurements and subjective disturbance caused by tinnitus. The sample was divided into two groups: Group 1 (G1) subjects with normal hearing; Group 2 (G2) subjects with hearing loss. Results: Among the patients considered, 115 ha…
Differences in pitch between tones affect behaviour even when incorrectly identified in direction.
2001
The ability to detect differences between simultaneously presented contra- and ipsilesional stimuli but not to identify the former on neurological patients with the symptom termed 'extinction' has given rise to the hypothesis that extinguished stimuli have impaired access to attentive processing but are detected pre-attentively. Such a dissociation found in normal participants with experimentally degraded sensory information, and its absence in equivalent tasks in terms of the amount of information required has, however, led to an alternative hypothesis that the lesser amount of information required to perform same/different judgements is sufficient to explain this dissociation. In the pres…
DPOAE‐Grams in Patients with Acute Tonal Tinnitus
2005
To investigate cochlear outer hair cell function in patients with acute tonal tinnitus and normal or near-normal hearing threshold.Prospective controlled study in an academic tertiary health center. Distortion products of otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE)-grams of 32 ears with acute tonal tinnitus and normal hearing or minimal hearing loss were compared with those of 17 healthy nontinnitus ears.Tinnitus ears exhibited relatively increased amplitudes of DPOAE at high frequencies (4-6.3 kHz) when compared with the group of healthy ears and relatively decreased DPOAE amplitudes at middle frequencies (1650-2400 Hz). Statistically significant ( P0.01) increased mean values of DPOAE amplitudes were o…