Diversity in pitch perception revealed by task dependence
Name
nihms919084.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.53 MB
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Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
0512b9ac6b4c2474f528f4f013e2a9ea
Author(s)
McPherson, Malinda J
McDermott, Joshua Hartman
Date Issued
2018
Journal
Nature Human Behaviour
Publisher
Springer Nature
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2017 The Author(s). Pitch conveys critical information in speech, music and other natural sounds, and is conventionally defined as the perceptual correlate of a sound's fundamental frequency (F0). Although pitch is widely assumed to be subserved by a single F0 estimation process, real-world pitch tasks vary enormously, raising the possibility of underlying mechanistic diversity. To probe pitch mechanisms, we conducted a battery of pitch-related music and speech tasks using conventional harmonic sounds and inharmonic sounds whose frequencies lack a common F0. Some pitch-related abilities - those relying on musical interval or voice recognition - were strongly impaired by inharmonicity, suggesting a reliance on F0. However, other tasks, including those dependent on pitch contours in speech and music, were unaffected by inharmonicity, suggesting a mechanism that tracks the frequency spectrum rather than the F0. The results suggest that pitch perception is mediated by several different mechanisms, only some of which conform to traditional notions of pitch.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41562-017-0261-8
