Influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination

Micheyl, Christophe; Delhommeau, Karine; Perrot, Xavier; Oxenham, Andrew J.

doi:10.1016/j.heares.2006.05.004

Cited by 416 publications

(425 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…As expected given past results (Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Micheyl et al, 2006;Strait et al, 2010;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b;Teki et al, 2012) we found musicians to be more sensitive than non-musicians to changes in three fundamental acoustical parameters: attack envelope (onset rise time), frequency excursion (FM depth), and carrier amplitude (AM depth). Musicians' finer perceptual skills did not extend to a visual measure or reflect a general advantage on psychophysical tasks in that they did not differ from controls in discriminating gradations in color hue -a perceptual skill not associated with musical expertise.…”

Section: Basic Psychoacoustic Measuressupporting

confidence: 91%

“…A considerable body of research suggests that musicians tend to out-perform non-musicians in perceiving fine differences in a number of basic auditory properties, including frequency and/or pitch (Spiegel & Watson, 1984;Micheyl et al, 2006; Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Amir, Amir & Kishon-Rabin, 2003;Nikjeh, Lister & Frisch, 2009; Koelsch, Schröger & Tervaniemi, 1999; GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 6 Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b), tone interval size (Zarate, Ritson & Poeppel, 2012Siegel & Siegel, 1977), temporal interval size (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006;Cicchini et al, 2012; Ehrle & Samson, 2005), and timbre (Pitt, 1994). Below, we review evidence for lower-level and contextually-relevant perceptual advantages in differently trained musician cohorts.…”

Section: Musicianship and Auditory Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Musicianship and Auditory Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, we saw no evidence of the predicted differences between musician groups. We then asked whether participants' performance changed across runs, and whether non-musicians' final runs might show thresholds similar to musicians' first runs (Micheyl et al, 2006;Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001). As noted in Methods (see 2.3.4.2), because not all participants completed four runs, group sizes were smaller and more unequal, so models were checked using Box's M test of equality of covariance matrices (Stevens, 1996), and results further verified using randomly selected samples with matching Ns.…”

Section: Auditory Psychophysical Thresholds (Figures 1a-c; Figures 2a-c)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Relatedly, electro and magnetoencephalography (EEG & MEG) data indicate enhanced cortical responses in musicians to the timbre of the specific instrument they perform (versus an instrument they do not), both in adults (Pantev et al, 2001;Shahin et al, 2003) and children (Shahin et al 2004;Trainor et al, 2003). Moreover, string and woodwind players -who constantly monitor and adjust the pitch they are producing -can discriminate frequency differences more finely than musicians who play fixed pitch instruments like piano (Micheyl et al, 2006;Spiegel & Watson, 1984).Bowed string instruments like violin also differ from fixed-pitch instruments like piano in that string players make extensive use of vibrato -a periodic but non-sinusoidal oscillation in the frequency and amplitude of a given note (Papich & Rainbow, 1974; see Mellody & Wakefield, 2000, for discussion of violin vibrato signal properties). Violinists manipulate vibrato (i.e., rate and depth of amplitude modulation [AM] and frequency modulation [FM]) for expressive and stylistic reasons.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

Carey

Rosen²,

Krishnan

et al. 2015

Cognition

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Performing musicians invest thousands of hours becoming experts in a range of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. The duration and intensity of musicians' training -far greater than that of most educational or rehabilitation programs -provides a useful model to test the extent to which skills acquired in one particular context (music) generalize to different domains. Here, we asked whether the instrument-specific and more instrument-general skills acquired during professional violinists' and pianists' training would generalize to superior performance on a wide range of analogous (largely non-musical) skills, when compared to closely matched non-musicians.Violinists and pianists outperformed non-musicians on fine-grained auditory psychophysical measures, but surprisingly did not differ from each other, despite the different demands of their instruments. Musician groups did differ on a tuning system perception task: violinists showed clearest biases towards the tuning system specific to their instrument, suggesting that long-term experience leads to selective perceptual benefits given a training-relevant context. However, we found only weak evidence of group differences in non-musical skills, with musicians differing marginally in one measure of sustained auditory attention, but not significantly on auditory scene analysis or multi-modal sequencing measures. Further, regression analyses showed that this sustained auditory attention metric predicted more variance in one auditory psychophysical measure than did musical expertise. Our findings suggest that specific musical expertise may yield distinct perceptual outcomes within contexts close to the area of training. Generalization of expertise to relevant cognitive domains may be less clear, particularly where the task context is non-musical.Keywords: expertise; musicians; perception; cognition; generalization GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 3 Highlights 1. We studied generalization of expertise to auditory perceptual and broader cognitive skills.2. Musician groups perceived auditory signal differences more finely than non-musicians.3. Musician groups differed in fine perception given a training-relevant context. 4. Musical expertise did not strongly generalize to several cognitive measures (e.g., auditory scene analysis).5. 5. Sustained attention predicted variance in fine perception of AM depth above expertise. GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 4 Generality and Specificity in the Effects of Musical Expertise on Perception and CognitionPerceptual and cognitive skills can be shaped and enhanced through our experience with the world (e.g., Goldstone, 1999;Palmeri & Gauthier, 2004). Pursuit of expertise in a given domain is a particularly striking example: groups as diverse as chess masters, physicians, athletes and musicians spend thousands of hours training and practicing, honing perceptual, cognitive and motor skills critical to success in their field (see Ericsson, 2006;Palmeri et al., 2004; Chi, 200...

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Section: Basic Psychoacoustic Measuressupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Musicianship and Auditory Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Musicianship and Auditory Perceptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Auditory Psychophysical Thresholds (Figures 1a-c; Figures 2a-c)mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

Carey

Rosen²,

Krishnan

et al. 2015

Cognition

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Prosody Recognition in Adults With High‐Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders: From Psychoacoustics to Cognition

et al. 2014

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Prosody is an important tool of human communication, carrying both affective and pragmatic messages in speech. Prosody recognition relies on processing of acoustic cues, such as the fundamental frequency of the voice signal, and their interpretation according to acquired socioemotional scripts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show deficiencies in affective prosody recognition. These deficiencies have been mostly associated with general difficulties in emotion recognition. The current study explored an additional association between affective prosody recognition in ASD and auditory perceptual abilities. Twenty high-functioning male adults with ASD and 32 typically developing male adults, matched on age and verbal abilities undertook a battery of auditory tasks. These included affective and pragmatic prosody recognition tasks, two psychoacoustic tasks (pitch direction recognition and pitch discrimination), and a facial emotion recognition task, representing nonvocal emotion recognition. Compared with controls, the ASD group demonstrated poorer performance on both vocal and facial emotion recognition, but not on pragmatic prosody recognition or on any of the psychoacoustic tasks. Both groups showed strong associations between psychoacoustic abilities and prosody recognition, both affective and pragmatic, although these were more pronounced in the ASD group. Facial emotion recognition predicted vocal emotion recognition in the ASD group only. These findings suggest that auditory perceptual abilities, alongside general emotion recognition abilities, play a significant role in affective prosody recognition in ASD.

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Intracortical myelination in musicians with absolute pitch: Quantitative morphometry using 7‐T MRI

Kim

Knösche

2016

Human Brain Mapping

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Absolute pitch (AP) is known as the ability to recognize and label the pitch chroma of a given tone without external reference. Known brain structures and functions related to AP are mainly of macroscopic aspects. To shed light on the underlying neural mechanism of AP, we investigated the intracortical myeloarchitecture in musicians with and without AP using the quantitative mapping of the longitudinal relaxation rates with ultra‐high‐field magnetic resonance imaging at 7 T. We found greater intracortical myelination for AP musicians in the anterior region of the supratemporal plane, particularly the medial region of the right planum polare (PP). In the same region of the right PP, we also found a positive correlation with a behavioral index of AP performance. In addition, we found a positive correlation with a frequency discrimination threshold in the anterolateral Heschl's gyrus in the right hemisphere, demonstrating distinctive neural processes of absolute recognition and relative discrimination of pitch. Regarding possible effects of local myelination in the cortex and the known importance of the anterior superior temporal gyrus/sulcus for the identification of auditory objects, we argue that pitch chroma may be processed as an identifiable object property in AP musicians. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3486–3501, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination

Cited by 416 publications

References 32 publications

Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

Prosody Recognition in Adults With High‐Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders: From Psychoacoustics to Cognition

Intracortical myelination in musicians with absolute pitch: Quantitative morphometry using 7‐T MRI

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