Music perception, pitch, and the auditory system

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The perception of music depends on many culture-specific factors, but is also constrained by properties of the auditory system. This has been best characterized for those aspects of music that involve pitch. Pitch sequences are heard in terms of relative as well as absolute pitch. Pitch combinations give rise to emergent properties not present in the component notes. In this review we discuss the basic auditory mechanisms contributing to these and other perceptual effects in music.

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

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