Music perception, pitch, and the auditory system
Introduction
Music involves the manipulation of sound. Our perception of music is thus influenced by how the auditory system encodes and retains acoustic information. This topic is not a new one, but recent methods and findings have made important contributions. We will review these along with some classic findings in this area. Understanding the auditory processes that occur during music can help to reveal why music is the way it is, and perhaps even provide some clues as to its origins. Music also provides a powerful stimulus with which to discover interesting auditory phenomena; these may in turn reveal auditory mechanisms that would otherwise go unnoticed or underappreciated.
We will focus primarily on the role of pitch in music. Pitch is one of the main dimensions along which sound varies in a musical piece. Other dimensions are important as well, of course, but the links between basic science and music are strongest for pitch, mainly because something is known about how pitch is analyzed by the auditory system. Timbre (see Glossary) [1] and rhythm [2], for instance, are less well linked to basic perceptual mechanisms, although these represent interesting areas for current and future research.
Section snippets
Pitch
Pitch is the perceptual correlate of periodicity in sounds. Periodic sounds by definition have waveforms that repeat in time (Figure 1a). They typically have harmonic spectra (Figure 1b), the frequencies of which are all multiples of a common fundamental frequency (F0). The F0 is the reciprocal of the period—the time it takes for the waveform to repeat once. The F0 need not be the most prominent frequency of the sound, however (Figure 1b), or indeed even be physically present. Although most
Pitch relations across time—relative pitch
When listening to a melody, we perceive much more than just the pitch of each successive note. In addition to these individual pitches, which we will term the absolute pitches of the notes, listeners also encode how the pitches of successive notes relate to each other—for instance, whether a note is higher or lower in pitch than the previous note, and perhaps by how much. Relative pitch is intrinsic to how we perceive music. We readily recognize a familiar melody when all the notes are shifted
Relative pitch—behavioral evidence
One of the most salient aspects of relative pitch is the direction of change (up or down) from one note to the next, known as the contour (Figure 2b). Most people are good at encoding the contour of a novel sequence of notes, as evidenced by the ability to recognize this contour when replicated in a transposed melody (Figure 2a) [12, 13]. Recent evidence indicates that contours can also be perceived in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness [14•]. A pattern of loudness
Neural mechanisms of relative pitch
Evidence from neuropsychology has generally been taken as suggestive that contour and intervals are mediated by distinct neural substrates [30, 31], with multiple reports that brain damage occasionally impairs interval information without having much effect on contour perception. Such findings are, however, also consistent with the idea that the contour is simply more robust to degradation. Alternatively, anatomical segregation could be due to separate mechanisms for contour and tonality
Relative, absolute, and perfect pitch
Our dichotomy of absolute and relative pitch omits another type of pitch perception, colloquially known as perfect pitch. To make matters more confusing this type of pitch perception is often referred to as absolute pitch in the scientific literature. Perfect pitch refers specifically to the ability to attach verbal labels to a large set of notes, typically those of the chromatic scale. It is a rare ability (roughly 1 in 10 000 people have it), and has little relevance to music perception in the
Representation of simultaneous pitches—chords and polyphony
One of the interesting features of pitch is that different sounds with different pitches can be combined to yield a rich array of new sounds. Music takes full advantage of this property, as the presence of multiple simultaneous voices in music is widespread [70]. This capability may in fact be one reason why pitch has such a prominent role in music, relative to many other auditory dimensions [71•]. An obvious question involves what is perceived when multiple pitches are played at once. Do
Consonance
Consonance is perhaps the most researched emergent property that occurs in chords. To Western listeners, certain combinations of notes, when played in isolation, seem pleasant (consonant), whereas others seem unpleasant (dissonant). Of course, the esthetic response to an interval or chord is also a function of the musical context; with appropriate surroundings, a dissonant interval can be quite pleasurable, and often serves important musical functions. However, in isolation, Western listeners
Summary and concluding remarks
The processing of pitch combinations is essential to the experience of music. In addition to perceiving the individual pitches of a sequence of notes, we encode and remember the relationships between the pitches. Listeners are particularly sensitive to whether the pitch increases or decreases from one note to the next. The precise interval by which the pitch changes is important in music, but is not readily perceived with much accuracy for arbitrary stimuli; listeners seem to use particular
References and recommended reading
Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:
• of special interest
•• of outstanding interest
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Matt Woolhouse for supplying Figure 3c, and Laurent Demany and Lauren Stewart for helpful comments on the manuscript. This work was supported by NIH grant R01 DC 05216.
Glossary
- Pure tone
- a tone with a sinusoidal waveform, consisting of a single frequency
- Complex tone
- any periodic tone whose waveform is not sinusoidal, consisting of multiple discrete frequencies
- Harmonic
- a pure tone whose frequency is an integer multiple of another frequency
- F0
- fundamental frequency. This is defined as the inverse of the period of a periodic sound, or equivalently as the greatest common factor of a set of harmonically related frequencies
- Octave
- a frequency interval corresponding to a doubling
References (100)
- et al.
Exploration of timbre by analysis and synthesis
- et al.
Neural processing of amplitude-modulated sounds
Physiological Reviews
(2004) - et al.
Pitch as a medium: a new approach to psychophysical scaling
American Journal of Psychology
(1971) - et al.
Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code
Cognition
(2005) - et al.
Contour, interval, and pitch recognition in memory for melodies
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(1970) Song: folk song and the music of folk song
Pitch perception of complex tones and human temporal-lobe function
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(1988)- et al.
Functional specificity in the right human auditory cortex for perceiving pitch direction
Brain
(2000) - et al.
Informational masking and musical training
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(2003) - et al.
On the binding of successive sounds: perceiving shifts in nonperceived pitches
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(2005)
Processing of frequency-modulated sounds in the lateral auditory belt cortex of the rhesus monkey
Journal of Neurophysiology
Absolute memory for musical pitch: evidence from the production of learned melodies
Perception and Psychophysics
Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound
Treatise on Harmony
Music perception and cognition following bilateral lesions of auditory cortex
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter
Auditory processing in primate cerebral cortex
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Evaluating auditory performance limits: I. One-parameter discrimination using a computational model for the auditory nerve
Neural Computation
Temporal and rate representations of time-varying signals in the auditory cortex of awake primates
Nature Neuroscience
Cortical representations of pitch in monkeys and humans
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Responses to sound of the basilar membrane of the mammalian cochlea
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
Interval and contour in melody processing
Music Perception
Recognition of transposed melodic sequences
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Categorical perception—phenomenon or epiphenomenon: evidence from experiments in the perception of melodic musical intervals
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Dichotic fusion of two tones one octave apart: evidence for internal octave templates
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Harmonic and melodic octave templates
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
The perceptual reality of tone chroma in early infancy
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Detection of inharmonicity in dichotic pure-tone dyads
Hearing Research
Frequency ratios and the perception of tone patterns
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Automatic and controlled processing of melodic contour and interval information measured by electrical brain activity
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The cognition of tonality—as we know it today
Journal of New Music Research
Tonal pitch space
Perception of musical tension in short chord sequences: the influence of harmonic function, sensory dissonance, horizontal motion, and musical training
Perception & Psychophysics
Scale and contour: two components of a theory of memory for melodies
Psychological Review
Melodic information processing and its development
Perception of timbre analogies
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London, Series B
Contribution of different cortical areas in the temporal lobes to music processing
Brain
Receptive amusia: evidence for cross-hemispheric neural networks underlying music processing strategies
Brain
Auditory atonalia for melodies
Cognitive Neuropsychology
Modularity of music processing
Nature Neuroscience
fMRI evidence for a cortical hierarchy of pitch pattern processing
PLoS ONE
Neural mechanisms underlying melodic pitch perception and memory for pitch
Journal of Neuroscience
Spectral and temporal processing in human auditory cortex
Cerebral Cortex
The processing of temporal pitch and melody information in auditory cortex
Neuron
An information theoretic characterization of auditory encoding
PLoS Biology
Evidence for the role of the right auditory cortex in fine pitch resolution
Neuropsychologia
A neural representation of pitch salience in nonprimary human auditory cortex revealed with functional magnetic resonance imaging
Journal of Neuroscience
The neuronal representation of pitch in primate auditory cortex
Nature
Cited by (144)
The transformative power of music: Insights into neuroplasticity, health, and disease
2024, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity - HealthTemporal hierarchies in the predictive processing of melody − From pure tones to songs
2023, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsThe Key to Singing Off-Key: The Trained Singer and Pitch Perception Distortion
2023, Journal of VoicePitch perception is more robust to interference and better resolved when provided by pulse rate than by modulation frequency of cochlear implant stimulation
2021, Hearing ResearchCitation Excerpt :The present article considers how temporal precision of stimulation affects the salience of pitch provided by electrical stimulation. Pitch has been aptly defined as the perceptual correlate of acoustic periodicity (McDermott and Oxenham, 2008). In healthy auditory physiology, periodic sounds produce a complex pattern of activity in the auditory nerve (Cedolin and Delgutte, 2010; Dreyer and Delgutte, 2006; Cariani and Delgutte, 1996; Su and Delgutte, 2019; Litvak et al., 2002; Larsen et al., 2008; Cariani and Delgutte, 1996).
Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex
2024, Science Advances