Familiar Tonal Context Improves Accuracy of Pitch Interval Perception

Abstract

A fundamental feature of everyday music perception is sensitivity to familiar tonal structures such as musical keys. Many studies have suggested that a tonal context can enhance the perception and representation of pitch. Most of these studies have measured response time, which may reflect expectancy as opposed to perceptual accuracy. We instead used a performance-based measure, comparing participants’ ability to discriminate between a “small, in-tune” interval and a “large, mistuned” interval in conditions that involved familiar tonal relations (diatonic, or major, scale notes), unfamiliar tonal relations (whole-tone or mistuned-diatonic scale notes), repetition of a single pitch, or no tonal context. The context was established with a brief sequence of tones in Experiment 1 (melodic context), and a cadence-like two-chord progression in Experiment 2 (harmonic context). In both experiments, performance significantly differed across the context conditions, with a diatonic context providing a significant advantage over no context; however, no correlation with years of musical training was observed. The diatonic tonal context also provided an advantage over the whole-tone scale context condition in Experiment 1 (melodic context), and over the mistuned scale or repetition context conditions in Experiment 2 (harmonic context). However, the relatively small benefit to performance suggests that the main advantage of tonal context may be priming of expected stimuli, rather than enhanced accuracy of pitch interval representation.

Dynamics of pitch perception in the auditory cortex

“…The immediacy of pitch representation in predictable contexts suggests that the expectation of pitch is instantly integrated with — or used to directly bias the processing of — the impoverished acoustic cues. This result fits with recent work showing that context does not necessarily enhance the pitch representation itself, but rather primes the auditory system for expected stimuli (Graves and Oxenham, 2017). Thus, the pitch of ambiguous tones was more easily accessible earlier when presented in context, but a similarly strong pitch representation still emerged, albeit later, without context.…”

Cents versus scale steps: Can we tell the difference between major and minor thirds?

“…The results reported here have critical implications for previous works on intervallic perception and tonal structures. Past literature suggests that cents are better detected and remembered in tonal contexts (e.g., Graves & Oxenham, 2017; Trainor et al, 1999). Our experiment challenges this idea, and we argue that the effect reported by these studies does not indicate that cents—as a low-level acoustic abstraction—are being detected and remembered in tonal environments.…”

“…In Graves and Oxenham’s (2017) study, for instance, individuals were presented with intervallic deviances within and outside a diatonic context. Despite the author’s suggestion that the tonal context may reinforce intervallic representations, this effect might be due to the fact that intervallic deviances generated non-diatonic notes, which may have served as a proxy for intervallic deviances.…”

The perception of octave pitch affinity and harmonic fusion have a common origin

“…A melody is a sequence of periodic sounds with specific frequency ratios, forming musical intervals that are perceived as pitch relations. The precision with which these intervals are perceived is of course limited; it depends on the listener's musical training, the intervals themselves, and other factors (Burns and Ward, 1978;Rakowski, 1990;Perlman and Krumhansl, 1996;McDermott et al, 2010;McClaskey, 2017;Graves and Oxenham, 2017).…”