Dissociation of pitch from timbre in auditory short-term memory

Abstract

In three experiments, untrained listeners made same/different judgments on pairs of pure or complex tones with periods that eventually differed by +/- 4%. On each trial, the two test tones were separated by 4.3 s, during which other tones (I) were heard but had to be ignored. The period (p) of the first test tone was randomly selected between 1/600 and 1/300 s. The period of each I tone was randomly selected among four possible values, close to p (+/- 3% or 6% apart) in some conditions, and remote from p in other conditions. In addition, from condition to condition, the spectral content of the I tones was varied independently of their periods: The I tones could have the same harmonic content as the test tones, or a very different harmonic content. Subjects' performances were much better when the periods of the I tones were remote from p than when they were close to p, as expected from previous findings by D. Deutsch [e.g., Science 175, 1020-1022 (1972)]. But, more importantly, the relation between the spectral contents of the I tones and the test tones had, by itself, practically no effect on performance. Thus performance was affected by the pitches of the I tones, but not by their timbres. These results suggest that pitch is processed independently of timbre in auditory short-term memory.

Influence of tonal context and timbral variation on perception of pitch

“…Pitch and timbre are found to influence each other when methodologies that present tones in the absence of a tonal context are used, such as comparing a single tone with another single tone by tuning (Platt & Racine, 1985), making qualitative judgments (Sing & Hirsh, 1992;Wapnick & Freeman, 1980), or classifying single tones into categories (Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992, Experiment 1;Melara & Marks, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c. In contrast, no evidence of an interaction is found by those studies that present tones in the context of other tones, as when interpolating tones are manipulated (Semal & Demany, 1991, 1993Starr & Pitt, 1997) or the fourth tones of two seven-tone sequences are compared, a modified interpolated tone paradigm (Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992, Experiments 2 and 3).…”

“…Some researchers have found that the timbre of a tone affects its perceived pitch (e.g., Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992, Experiment 1; Melara & Marks, 1990a, 1990b, 1990cPlatt & Racine, 1985;Singh & Hirsh, 1992;Wapnick & Freeman, 1980), whereas others have found no effect of timbre on pitch perception (e.g., Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992, Experiments 2 and 3; Semal & Demany 1991, 1993. It seems that those studies presenting tones in the absence of other tones tend to find an interaction between pitch and timbre, whereas studies presenting tones within the context of other tones find no such interaction (but see also , in which pitch and timbre difference thresholds for isolated tones were not affected by variation in the irrelevant dimension).…”

Temporal interval production and short-term memory

“…The paradigm used by Deutsch (1970) to establish the dissociation between pitch memory and phonological memory has also been used to establish the separation between pitch and timbre. Semal and Demany (1991) demonstrated that varying the timbre of material interpolated in a retention interval had no impact upon pitch recognition judgments. Starr and Pitt (1997) showed that recognition memory for timbre is sensitive to interference from the timbre of intervening stimuli and that varying the pitch of intervening stimuli has no impact upon timbre recognition.…”

Separate Neural Processing of Timbre Dimensions in Auditory Sensory Memory

“…Behavioral research using in particular the interference paradigm introduced by Deutsch (1970) has shown that different auditory attributes are represented separately in auditory sensory memory as, for example, pitch and timbre (Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992;Semal & Demany, 1991) or pitch and loudness (Clément, Demany, & Semal, 1999). At the neurophysiological level, auditory sensory memory organization has mostly been studied using the MMN component of the ERP (Näätänen, Gaillard, & Mantysalo, 1978) and its magnetic counterpart denoted MMNm.…”