13 research outputs found
Bidirectional Interactions of Pitch and Time
Materials for the paper:
Pazdera, J. K. & Trainor, L. J. (2023). Bidirectional interactions of pitch and time. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Music Cognition and Perception.
Please see the GitHub repository README files for documentation on all code and data. A preprint of this manuscript is available at: https://easychair.org/publications/preprint_download/FQl
Pitch-Induced Illusory Percepts of Time
Past research suggests that pitch height can influence the perceived tempo of speech and music, such that higher-pitched signals seem faster than lower-pitched ones. However, previous studies have only analyzed stimuli separated by up to two octaves. To investigate whether this higher-equals-faster illusion generalizes across the wider range of human hearing, we conducted a series of five experiments. We asked participants to compare the tempo of repeating tones from six different octaves and with fifteen different interonset intervals to a metronomic standard tempo. In Experiments 1β3, we observed an inverted U-shaped effect of pitch on perceived tempo, with the perceived tempo of piano tones peaking between A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) and decreasing at lower and higher frequencies. This bias was consistent across base tempos and was not attenuated by synchronous tapping with the repeating tones. Experiment 4 additionally tested synthetic complex tones to verify that this nonlinearity generalizes beyond the piano timbre, and that it was not related to low-pitched mechanical noise present in our piano tones. Experiment 5 revealed that the decrease in perceived tempo at extremely high octaves can be abolished by exposing participants to only high-pitched tones. Together, our results suggest that perceived tempo depends more on relative pitch within a context than on absolute pitch, and that tempo biases may invert or taper off beyond a two-octave range. We relate this context-dependence to human vocal ranges and propose that illusory tempo effects are strongest within pitch ranges consistent with human vocalization
Pitch biases sensorimotor synchronization to auditory rhythms
Current models of rhythm perception propose that humans track musical beats using the phase, period, and amplitude of sound patterns. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that pitch can also influence the perceived timing of auditory signals. In the present study, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether pitch also affects the tempo and asynchrony of sensorimotor synchronization. To do so, we asked participants to synchronize with a repeating tone, whose pitch on each trial was drawn from one of six different octaves (110β3520 Hz). In Experiment 1, we observed U-shaped patterns in both mean asynchrony and continuation tapping rates, with participants tapping latest and slowest when synchronizing to low and extremely high (above 2000 Hz) pitches, and tapping earliest and fastest to moderately high pitches. In Experiment 2, we found that extremely high pitches still produced slower timing than moderately high pitches when participants were exposed to an exclusively high-pitched context. We advocate for the incorporation of pitch into models of rhythm perception, and we discuss the possibility that there may exist two pitch-based influences on perceived tempo: a learned correlation between higher pitches and faster timing, and a U-shaped effect of stimulus frequency on neural dynamics
Modality Effects in Free Recall: A Retrieved-Context Account
The modality effect refers to the robust finding that memory performance differs for items presented aurally, as compared with visually. Whereas auditory presentation leads to stronger recency performance in immediate recall, visual presentation often produces better primacy performance (the inverse modality effect). To investigate and model these differences, we conducted two large-scale web-based immediate free recall experiments. In both experiments, participants studied visual and auditory word lists of varying lengths and rates of presentation. We observed typical modality and inverse modality effects, while also discovering that participants were more likely to initiate recall from recent items on auditory trials than on visual trials. However, modality effects persisted regardless of the first item recalled. Meanwhile, an analysis of intrusion errors revealed that participants were more likely on visual trials than on auditory trials to erroneously recall words from one list prior. Furthermore, words presented in the same modality as the present list intruded more often than those presented in a different modality. We next developed a retrieved-context account of the modality effect by fitting the Context Maintenance and Retrieval model to data across multiple list lengths. Through our simulations, we demonstrate that the modality effect can be explained by faster contextual drift and stronger context-to-item association formation during auditory presentation, relative to visual. Our modeling shows that modality effects can arise without hypothesizing distinct memory stores for recent and remote information. Finally, we propose that modality effects may derive primarily from the temporal dynamics of stimuli, rather than their modality
Timing-induced illusory percepts of pitch
It has long been proposed that the brain integrates pitch and timing cues during auditory perception. If true, the pitch of a sound should influence its perceived timing, and the timing of a sound should similarly influence its perceived pitch. Previous research suggests that changes in the pitch of speech and music can induce illusory changes in their perceived tempo. We conducted two experiments to test the opposite effect: whether deviations from rhythmic timing can also influence the perceived pitch of a sound. In Experiment 1, participants heard an isochronous, repeating standard tone followed by a potentially mistimed, pitch-shifted probe tone, and were asked to discriminate between pitch increases and decreases. We observed a strong biasing effect of the probe's timing on its perceived pitch, such that later probes were more likely to be perceived as lower than the standard. Correct, bias-conforming responses to mistimed probes were also significantly faster than responses to probe tones played on the beat. In Experiment 2, we used an adaptive-difficulty version of Experiment 1 to investigate whether this timing-induced bias strengthens under conditions of low discriminability. We found that the biasing effects of probe timing were similarly strong regardless of how large the to-be-judged pitch difference was, and regardless of individual differences in pitch sensitivity. Alongside previous literature on pitch-induced illusory tempo changes, our present observation of timing-induced illusory pitch changes support the hypothesis that pitch and time are perceptually integrated. We discuss pitch-time integration within a Bayesian framework, as a possible result of a learned prior reflecting real-world correlations between changes in pitch and timing