@article {5087, title = {Harmonicity aids hearing in noise}, journal = {Attention, Perception, \& Psychophysics}, year = {2022}, month = {01/2022}, abstract = {

Hearing in noise is a core problem in audition, and a challenge for hearing-impaired listeners, yet the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. We explored whether harmonic frequency relations, a signature property of many communication sounds, aid hearing in noise for normal hearing listeners. We measured detection thresholds in noise for tones and speech synthesized to have harmonic or inharmonic spectra. Harmonic signals were consistently easier to detect than otherwise identical inharmonic signals. Harmonicity also improved discrimination of sounds in noise. The largest benefits were observed for two-note up-down {\textquotedblleft}pitch{\textquotedblright} discrimination and melodic contour discrimination, both of which could be performed equally well with harmonic and inharmonic tones in quiet, but which showed large harmonic advantages in noise. The results show that harmonicity facilitates hearing in noise, plausibly by providing a noise-robust pitch cue that aids detection and discrimination.

}, issn = {1943-3921}, doi = {10.3758/s13414-021-02376-0}, url = {https://link.springer.com/10.3758/s13414-021-02376-0}, author = {McPherson, Malinda J. and Grace, River C. and Josh H. McDermott} } @article {4819, title = {Time-dependent discrimination advantages for harmonic sounds suggest efficient coding for memory}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences}, volume = {117}, year = {2020}, month = {12/2020}, pages = {32169 - 32180}, abstract = {

Perceptual systems have finite memory resources and must store incoming signals in compressed formats. To explore whether representations of a sound{\textquoteright}s pitch might derive from this need for compression, we compared discrimination of harmonic and inharmonic sounds across delays. In contrast to inharmonic spectra, harmonic spectra can be summarized, and thus compressed, using their fundamental frequency (f0). Participants heard two sounds and judged which was higher. Despite being comparable for sounds presented back-to-back, discrimination was better for harmonic than inharmonic stimuli when sounds were separated in time, implicating memory representations unique to harmonic sounds. Patterns of individual differences (correlations between thresholds in different conditions) indicated that listeners use different representations depending on the time delay between sounds, directly comparing the spectra of temporally adjacent sounds, but transitioning to comparing f0s across delays. The need to store sound in memory appears to determine reliance on f0-based pitch, and may explain its importance in music, in which listeners must extract relationships between notes separated in time.

}, issn = {0027-8424}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.2008956117}, url = {http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.2008956117}, author = {McPherson, Malinda J. and Josh H. McDermott} } @article {4313, title = {Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing}, journal = {Current Biology}, year = {2019}, month = {09/2019}, abstract = {

Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear. We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon{\textemdash}the Tsimane{\textquoteright}, who live in relative isolation from Western culture{\textemdash}as well as US musicians and non-musicians. Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges. Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range. Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible. But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above or below the heard tones, Amazonians did not, ignoring the note {\textquotedblleft}chroma{\textquotedblright} (C, D, etc.). Chroma matching in US participants was more pronounced in US musicians than non-musicians, was not affected by feedback, and was correlated with similarity-based measures of octave equivalence as well as the ability to match the absolute f0 of a stimulus in the singing range. The results suggest the cross-cultural presence of logarithmic scales for pitch, and biological constraints on the limits of pitch, but indicate that octave equivalence may be culturally contingent, plausibly dependent on pitch representations that develop from experience with particular musical systems.

}, keywords = {absolute pitch, bio-musicology, cross-cultural psychology, mental scales, music cognition, octave equivalence, pitch, relative pitch, singing, Tsimane{\textquoteright}}, issn = {09609822}, doi = {10.1016/j.cub.2019.08.020}, url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S096098221931036X}, author = {Jacoby, Nori and Undurraga, Eduardo A. and McPherson, Malinda J. and Vald{\'e}s, Joaqu{\'\i}n and Ossand{\'o}n, Tom{\'a}s and Josh H. McDermott} }