On the binding of successive sounds: Perceiving shifts in nonperceived pitches

Spectral contrast effects may help "normalize" the incoming sound and produce perceptual constancy in the face of the variable acoustics produced by different rooms, talkers, and backgrounds. Recent studies have concentrated on the after-effects produced by the long-term average power spectrum. The present study examined contrast effects based on spectral motion, analogous to visual-motion after-effects. In experiment 1, the existence of spectral-motion after-effects with word-length inducers was established by demonstrating that the identification of the direction of a target spectral glide was influenced by the spectral motion of a preceding inducer glide. In experiment 2, the target glide was replaced with a synthetic sine-wave speech sound, including a formant transition. The speech category boundary was shifted by the presence and direction of the inducer glide. Finally, in experiment 3, stimuli based on synthetic sine-wave speech sounds were used as both context and target stimuli to show that the spectral-motion after-effects could occur even with inducers with relatively short speech-like durations and small frequency excursions. The results suggest that spectral motion may play a complementary role to the long-term average power spectrum in inducing speech context effects.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 56%

Spectral motion contrast as a speech context effect

Wang

Oxenham

2014

“…The notion that basic pitch discrimination is unusual compared to that in other dimensions may relate to recent findings that listeners can detect frequency shifts to a component of a complex tone even when unable to tell if the component is present in the tone or not ͑Demany and Ramos, 2005;Demany et al, 2009͒. Such findings suggest that the auditory system may possess frequency-shift detectors that could produce an advantage in fine-grained basic discrimination for pitch compared to other dimensions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Musical intervals and relative pitch: Frequency resolution, not interval resolution, is special

McDermott

Keebler

Micheyl

et al. 2010

Pitch intervals are central to most musical systems, which utilize pitch at the expense of other acoustic dimensions. It seemed plausible that pitch might uniquely permit precise perception of the interval separating two sounds, as this could help explain its importance in music. To explore this notion, a simple discrimination task was used to measure the precision of interval perception for the auditory dimensions of pitch, brightness, and loudness. Interval thresholds were then expressed in units of just-noticeable differences for each dimension, to enable comparison across dimensions. Contrary to expectation, when expressed in these common units, interval acuity was actually worse for pitch than for loudness or brightness. This likely indicates that the perceptual dimension of pitch is unusual not for interval perception per se, but rather for the basic frequency resolution it supports. The ubiquity of pitch in music may be due in part to this fine-grained basic resolution.

“…As a result of this shift, the target is more salient and allows the listener to use it for pitch comparisons (frequency shift enhancement; Erviti et al, 2011;Demany et al, 2013). These experiments suggest the presence of frequency shift detectors (Demany and Ramos, 2005) that appear to have the same perceptual effect that adaptation of inhibition may have in intensity enhancement paradigms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

The salience of enhanced components within inharmonic complexes

Byrne

Stellmack

Viemeister

2013

A subjective listening task was used to measure the salience of enhanced components using typical intensity-enhancement stimuli, time-reversed versions of those stimuli, and stimuli which contained a frequency shift of the target component. Twenty-five listeners judged whether or not a pitch "stood out" within an inharmonic complex. For comparison, judgments also were made for stimuli with a single segment that consisted of a simultaneously masked target. The results indicate that the perceived salience of enhanced components is greater than might be predicted by the effective magnitude of those components, and that informational masking is likely involved.