A key component of musical proficiency is the ability to discriminate between and identify musical intervals, or fixed ratios between pitches. Acquiring these skills requires training, but little is known about how to best arrange the trials within a training session. To address this issue, learning on a musical-interval comparison task was evaluated for two four-day training regimens that employed equal numbers of stimulus presentations per day. A regimen of continuous practice yielded no learning, but a regimen that combined practice and stimulus exposure alone generated clear improvement. Learning in the practice-plus-exposure regimen was due to the combination of the two experiences, because two control groups who received only either the practice or the exposure from that regimen did not learn. Posttest performance suggested that this improvement in comparison learning generalized to an untrained stimulus type and an untrained musical-interval identification task. Naïve comparison performance, but not learning, was better for larger pitch-ratio differences and for individuals with more musical experience. The reported benefits of the practice-plus-exposure regimen mirror the outcomes for fine-grained discrimination and speech tasks, suggesting that a general learning principle is involved. In practical terms, it appears that combining practice and stimulus exposure alone is a particularly effective configuration for improving musical-interval perception.
Perceptual bistability-the spontaneous, irregular fluctuation of perception between two interpretations of a stimulus-occurs when observing a large variety of ambiguous stimulus configurations. This phenomenon has the potential to serve as a tool for, among other things, understanding how function varies across individuals due to the large individual differences that manifest during perceptual bistability. Yet it remains difficult to interpret the functional processes at work, without knowing where bistability arises during perception. In this study we explore the hypothesis that bistability originates from multiple sources distributed across the perceptual hierarchy. We develop a hierarchical model of auditory processing comprised of three distinct levels: a Peripheral, tonotopic analysis, a Central analysis computing features found more centrally in the auditory system, and an Object analysis, where sounds are segmented into different streams. We model bistable perception within this system by applying adaptation, inhibition and noise into one or all of the three levels of the hierarchy. We evaluate a large ensemble of variations of this hierarchical model, where each model has a different configuration of adaptation, inhibition and noise. This approach avoids the assumption that a single configuration must be invoked to explain the data. Each model is evaluated based on its ability to replicate two hallmarks of bistability during auditory streaming: the selectivity of bistability to specific stimulus configurations, and the characteristic log-normal pattern of perceptual switches. Consistent with a distributed origin, a broad range of model parameters across this hierarchy lead to a plausible form of perceptual bistability.
Potential users of audio production software, such as audio equalizers, may be discouraged by the complexity of the interface and a lack of clear affordances in typical interfaces. In this work, we create a personalized on-screen slider that lets the user manipulate the audio with an equalizer in terms of a descriptive term (e.g. "warm"). The system learns mappings by presenting a sequence of sounds to the user and correlating the gain in each frequency band with the user's preference rating. This method is extended and improved on by incorporating knowledge from a database of prior concepts taught to the system by prior users. This is done with a combination of active learning and simple transfer learning. Results on a study of 35 participants show personalized audio manipulation tool can be built with 10 times fewer interactions than is possible with the baseline approach.
In the presence of a continually changing sensory environment, maintaining stable but flexible awareness is paramount, and requires continual organization of information. Determining which stimulus features belong together, and which are separate is therefore one of the primary tasks of the sensory systems. Unknown is whether there is a global or sensory-specific mechanism that regulates the final perceptual outcome of this streaming process. To test the extent of modality independence in perceptual control, an auditory streaming experiment, and a visual moving-plaid experiment were performed. Both were designed to evoke alternating perception of an integrated or segregated percept. In both experiments, transient auditory and visual distractor stimuli were presented in separate blocks, such that the distractors did not overlap in frequency or space with the streaming or plaid stimuli, respectively, thus preventing peripheral interference. When a distractor was presented in the opposite modality as the bistable stimulus (visual distractors during auditory streaming or auditory distractors during visual streaming), the probability of percept switching was not significantly different than when no distractor was presented. Conversely, significant differences in switch probability were observed following within-modality distractors, but only when the pre-distractor percept was segregated. Due to the modality-specificity of the distractor-induced resetting, the results suggest that conscious perception is at least partially controlled by modality-specific processing. The fact that the distractors did not have peripheral overlap with the bistable stimuli indicates that the perceptual reset is due to interference at a locus in which stimuli of different frequencies and spatial locations are integrated.
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