Consonance perception beyond the traditional existence region of pitch

Abstract

Some theories posit that the perception of consonance is based on neural periodicity detection, which is dependent on accurate phase locking of auditory nerve fibers to features of the stimulus waveform. In the current study, 15 listeners were asked to rate the pleasantness of complex tone dyads (two note chords) forming various harmonic intervals, and bandpass filtered in a high frequency region (all components > 5.8 kHz), where phase locking to the rapid stimulus fine structure is thought to be severely degraded or absent. The two notes were presented to opposite ears. Consonant intervals (minor third, and perfect fifth) received higher ratings than dissonant intervals (minor second, and tritone). The results could not be explained in terms of phase locking to the slower waveform envelope, because the preference for consonant intervals was higher when the stimuli were harmonic, compared to a condition in which they were made inharmonic by shifting their component frequencies by a constant offset, so as to preserve their envelope periodicity. Overall the results indicate that, if phase locking is indeed absent at frequencies greater than ∼ 5 kHz, neural periodicity detection is not necessary for the perception of consonance.

The role of cochlear place coding in the perception of frequency modulation

“…Results from the present study suggest that resolved harmonics, which are most important for human pitch perception, may be represented by their place of stimulation rather than by the temporal fine structure information encoded via the stimulus-driven spike timing (phase locking). This conclusion is consistent with other studies showing that pitch perception is possible even with spectrally resolved harmonics that are usually assumed to be too high in frequency to elicit phase locking (Oxenham et al, 2011;Lau et al, 2017;Carcagno et al, 2019) and with studies showing that steep filter slopes are required to represent harmonics from filtered noise in noise-vocoder simulations (Mehta and Oxenham, 2017). It is also supported by recent data from the inferior colliculus of the rabbit, showing that place coding of low-numbered harmonics from high F0s in the midbrain is robust over a relatively wide range of sound levels (Su and Delgutte, 2020), a finding that should generalize to low F0s in humans, given our superior frequency selectivity.…”

Automatic responses to musical intervals: Contrasts in acoustic roughness predict affective priming in Western listeners

“…However, it has been pointed out that beats could also occur centrally, within a binaural critical band rather than being based on cochlear interactions (Carcagno et al, 2019). Second, the perceived consonance of a chord does not seem to increase when roughness is artificially removed (Nordmark and Fahlén, 1988).…”

Harmonic Cancellation - a Fundamental of Auditory Scene Analysis

“…Time-domain and hybrid models entail time domain signal processing within the brain. Anatomical and physiological specializations to support such processing include transduction and coding of acoustic temporal structure in the auditory nerve (up to 4-5 kHz or possibly higher, Heinz et al, 2001;Hartmann et al, 2019;Carcagno et al, 2019;Verschooten, 2019), specialized synapses in the cochlear nucleus and subsequent relays, and fast excitatory and inhibitory interaction in the medial and lateral superior olives (MSO and LSO) (Grothe, 2000;Zheng and Escabí, 2013;Keine et al, 2016;Beiderbeck et al, 2018;Stasiak et al, 2018) and other nuclei (Albrecht et al, 2014;Caspari et al, 2015;Felix et al, 2017). Some of these circuits are interpreted as serving binaural interaction but could be borrowed for other needs (see Joris and van der Heijden, 2019;Kandler et al, 2020, for recent reviews).…”