Context sensitivity and invariance in perception of octave-ambiguous tones

Repp, Bruno H.; Thompson, Jacqueline

doi:10.1007/s00426-009-0264-9

Cited by 12 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 36 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Interestingly, unlike the "fundamental frequency" of ordinary harmonic tones, that dominant partial is not usually the lowest one in the spectrum. Rather, partials near 300 Hz seem to be favored perceptually (Repp & Thompson, 2010;Terhardt et al, 1986).…”

Section: An Analogy With Pitch Perception In Shepard Tonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comments on "Tactus ≠ Tempo: Some Dissociations Between Attentional Focus, Motor Behavior, and Tempo Judgment" by Justin London

Repp¹

2011

Empirical Musicology Review

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Objective measures of musical tempo are linked to a particular metrical pulse, and this is most likely true for subjective tempo as well. Therefore, tapping along with a rhythm should be predictive of relative tempo judgments. The difficulty of such judgments may lie in the choice of a particular metrical level as the referent. Multiple levels may compete and create ambiguity. Analogies are drawn with pitch perception from certain types of complex tones.Submitted 2011 January 19; accepted 2011 February 14. KEYWORDS: tempo, meter, tactus, tapping, pitch, timbre LONDON (2011) has made an interesting empirical contribution to the study of tempo judgment. He asked participants to compare the tempi of simple isochronous rhythms in which one or two higher metrical levels were highlighted by regularly recurring pitch accents. When two different rhythmic patterns were presented in succession, participants often did not make their judgments according to the tempo of the nominal tactus (the quarter note). London's main conclusion is that "our perception of musical speed or tempo is more than simple apprehension of the tactus rate" (p. 1). Does he mean the nominal tactus rate or any tactus rate? NOMINAL VERSUS SUBJECTIVE TACTUSThe rate of the nominal tactus of his materials (100 or 120 beats per minute) was chosen to be in the most preferred region for a musical beat (Parncutt, 1994;van Noorden & Moelants, 1999). However, that does not guarantee that participants would always choose the nominal tactus as the most salient metrical level. The subjective tactus might differ, especially when higher metrical levels carry regular pitch accents. Indeed, in his Experiment 3, where participants were required to tap along with each rhythm, London found that they did not always tap with the nominal tactus. Presumably, they tapped with their subjective tactus.One reasonable conjecture then is that participants made their tempo judgments according to their subjective tactus, regardless of whether they did or did not tap along with it. London found that instructions to "focus on the beat rate" (p. 3, Experiment 2) or "tap along with the beat" (p. 4, Experiment 3) had relatively little effect on participants' tempo judgments. From his description it seems he did not instruct participants to focus on or tap along with the quarter-note beat, only with "the beat." That beat then was most likely the subjective tactus, and if it already formed the basis of tempo judgments in Experiment 1, then it is understandable that focusing on or tapping along with it had little additional effect.If my conjecture is right, then the tempo judgments in Experiment 3 should have been consistent with the tapping tempi. Although London examined these tempi and related them to different metrical levels, he does not report how they related to the tempo judgments. If participants tapped faster to one rhythm than to another on any given trial, did they always (or nearly always) judge the tempo of the former to be faster than the tempo of the latter? Th...

show abstract

Section: An Analogy With Pitch Perception In Shepard Tonesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comments on "Tactus ≠ Tempo: Some Dissociations Between Attentional Focus, Motor Behavior, and Tempo Judgment" by Justin London

Repp¹

2011

Empirical Musicology Review

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Tritone stimuli therefore, may be ideally suited to serve as bistable auditory stimuli. Surprisingly, only a few previous studies have noted the bistable characteristics of Shepard tone pairs (Giangrande et al, 2003; Repp and Knoblich, 2007; Repp and Thompson, 2010). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Auditory event-related potentials associated with perceptual reversals of bistable pitch motion

Davidson

Pitts

2014

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Previous event-related potential (ERP) experiments have consistently identified two components associated with perceptual transitions of bistable visual stimuli, the “reversal negativity” (RN) and the “late positive complex” (LPC). The RN (~200 ms post-stimulus, bilateral occipital-parietal distribution) is thought to reflect transitions between neural representations that form the moment-to-moment contents of conscious perception, while the LPC (~400 ms, central-parietal) is considered an index of post-perceptual processing related to accessing and reporting one’s percept. To explore the generality of these components across sensory modalities, the present experiment utilized a novel bistable auditory stimulus. Pairs of complex tones with ambiguous pitch relationships were presented sequentially while subjects reported whether they perceived the tone pairs as ascending or descending in pitch. ERPs elicited by the tones were compared according to whether perceived pitch motion changed direction or remained the same across successive trials. An auditory reversal negativity (aRN) component was evident at ~170 ms post-stimulus over bilateral fronto-central scalp locations. An auditory LPC component (aLPC) was evident at subsequent latencies (~350 ms, fronto-central distribution). These two components may be auditory analogs of the visual RN and LPC, suggesting functionally equivalent but anatomically distinct processes in auditory vs. visual bistable perception.

show abstract

“…Recent studies scrutinized the role of prior auditory context in the processing of Shepard tone pairs (Repp and Thompson, 2010;Chambers and Pressnitzer, 2014). Lately, Chambers et al (2017) capitalized on the ambiguity of half-octave Shepard tone shifts (replicated in their first experiment) and demonstrated (in a second, in addition to four other experiments) that the presence of a prior context robustly modulates listeners' pitch shift judgments.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Timbral Shepard-illusion reveals ambiguity and context sensitivity of brightness perception

Siedenburg

2018

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research has described strong effects of prior context on the perception of ambiguous pitch shifts of Shepard tones [Chambers, Akram, Adam, Pelofi, Sahani, Shamma, and Pressnitzer (2017). Nat. Commun. 8, 15027]. Here, similar effects are demonstrated for brightness shift judgments of harmonic complexes with cyclic spectral envelope components and fixed fundamental frequency. It is shown that frequency shifts of the envelopes are perceived as systematic shifts of brightness. Analogous to the work of Chambers et al., the perceptual ambiguity of half-octave shifts resolves with the presentation of prior context tones. These results constitute a context effect for the perceptual processing of spectral envelope shifts and indicate so-far unknown commonalities between pitch and timbre perception.

show abstract

Context sensitivity and invariance in perception of octave-ambiguous tones

Cited by 12 publications

References 36 publications

Comments on "Tactus ≠ Tempo: Some Dissociations Between Attentional Focus, Motor Behavior, and Tempo Judgment" by Justin London

Comments on "Tactus ≠ Tempo: Some Dissociations Between Attentional Focus, Motor Behavior, and Tempo Judgment" by Justin London

Auditory event-related potentials associated with perceptual reversals of bistable pitch motion

Timbral Shepard-illusion reveals ambiguity and context sensitivity of brightness perception

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About