Spectral-motion aftereffects and the tritone paradox among Canadian subjects

Abstract

The effect of spectral motion on the tritone paradox was investigated by pretesting subjects residing in southwestern Ontario, Canada, on the tritone task, presenting them with a continuous ascending or descending chromatic scale created using Shepard tones, and then retesting them on the tritone task. Results indicated a negative-motion aftereffect that affected the orientation of the pitch class circle. Differential effects of perceived pitch height on the lower portion of the pitch class circle and of adaptation on the upper portion of the pitch class circle were found in the pre-and postadaptation data, respectively. The implications of this dissociation are discussed. In addition, since our subjects lived relatively close to the U.S. border, the experimental pretests allowed us to examine the hypothesis that a canonical American pitch template similar to that found among "Californian" subjects (Deutsch, 1991) is propagated by linguistic influences of media such as television and radio (Ragozzine & Deutsch, 1994). A survey of our subjects indicated that overall, the majority of time engaged in listening to the radio and watching television or movies was spent with American sources. Despite this, and despite the fact that subjects had widely varying language and cultural backgrounds, a tight distribution of peak-pitch classes was found that is indicative of a "British" pitch template (Deutsch, 1991) for every subject tested.For more than 30 years, researchers have made use of specially designed complex harmonic tones in their investigations of different perceptual attributes associated with tonal relationships (Shepard, 1964). In these Shepard tones, adjacent partials are spaced at octave intervals and then filtered through a constant spectral envelope. Shepard tones are useful as stimuli in many psychoacoustic investigations because they ambiguate pitch height while maintaining the chroma of the tone being played. For example, repetitively playing the same 12 chromatic tones spanning an octave will create an illusion of a continuous ascending or descending pitch sequence, depending on whether one plays the chromatic series as ascending or descending, respectively ( Figure IA).Playing pairs ofsuch tones will create the perception of an ascending or descending interval on the basis of pitch proximity. Ifthe second tone is less than halfan octave (an interval called the "tritone") above the first, one typically perceives an ascending interval, whereas if the interval is greater than the tritone, one perceives it as descendingThe authors are grateful to 1. Visser for her assistance in running subjects, A. Cohen for providing information regarding an unpublished study, and K. Kewish, D. Deutsch, B. Repp, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. This research was supported by grants to L

Context sensitivity and invariance in perception of octave-ambiguous tones

“…Here the envelope center had only a small eVect on the SHPC, as in previous studies by Deutsch (1987Deutsch ( , 1991Deutsch et al, 1987) and others (Dawe et al, 1998;Giangrande, 1998). The reason for this diVerence from previous results obtained in the same laboratory, even using the same headphones, is not known.…”

“…First, Experiment 1B included a no-context baseline condition, because it could be that UA primes, regardless of whether they are rising or falling, change the SHPC relative to the standard tritone paradox condition in which OA pairs follow immediately upon each other. Second, we employed Although only one participant (Cl2) was a native speaker of British English, the average pattern curiously resembles that found previously with Southern British listeners (Deutsch, 1991) and also with a linguistically heterogeneous group of students in Canada (Dawe et al, 1998). two diVerent sets of OA tones with diVerent spectral envelopes. This gave us an opportunity to re-investigate the eVect of envelope center on the SHPC, a contentious issue in the past, and also to examine whether priming diVers across envelope sets.…”

“…Dawe et al (1998) found that a preceding rising or falling Shepard scale can also bias perception of tritone pairs. Repp (1997) preceded each tritone pair with a single OA tone whose pitch class was halfway between the pitch classes of the tritone pair (see also Shepard, 1983).…”

“…This prediction is not conWrmed by data, however. In most studies of the tritone paradox, the SHPC has been nearly invariant across tone sets with diVerent spectral envelopes (e.g., Dawe, Platt, & Welsh 1998;Deutsch, 1987Deutsch, , 1991Deutsch, Kuyper, & Fisher, 1987;Giangrande, 1998), and in those studies in which the SHPC was found to change along with the envelope (Repp, 1994(Repp, , 1997, the mean SHPC was not the pitch class 3 st above the envelope center but rather the one 6 st away. In all studies, moreover, there were substantial individual diVerences in the SHPC, which Deutsch (1991) attributed to an inXuence of long-term auditory experience, particularly with linguistic pitch patterns, an intriguing hypothesis that has been the subject of a number of subsequent studies (Deutsch, 1994;Deutsch, Henthorn, & Dolson 2004;Giangrande, 1998;Ragozzine & Deutsch, 1994;Repp, 1994).…”

Loss and persistence of implicit memory for sound: Evidence from auditory stream segregation context effects

“…Context effects have been observed for the perception of basic auditory attributes, such as loudness (e.g., Gordon & Schneider, 2007;Marks, 1993;Oberfeld, 2007;Plack & Viemeister, 1992;Viemeister & Bacon, 1982;Zeng, Turner, & Relkin, 1991), pitch (e.g., Dawe, Platt, & Welsh, 1998;Okada & Kashino, 2003;Repp, 1997;Shu, Swindale, & Cynader, 1993), timbre (e.g., Summerfield, Haggard, Foster, & Gray, 1984), and sound location (e.g., Kashino & Nishida, 1998;Kopco, Best, & Shinn-Cunningham, 2007), as well as for the perception of speech-specifically, phoneme boundaries (e.g., Holt, 2005;Samuel, 1986), vocal affect (e.g., Bestelmeyer, Rouger, DeBruine, & Belin, 2010), and voice gender (e.g., Zaske, Schweinberger, Kaufmann, & Kawahara, 2009). However, very little is known about the time course of these implicit influences of prior stimuli or prior percepts and whether they undergo interference or show persistent effects.…”