Auditory Imagery and the Poor-Pitch Singer

The vocal imitation of pitch by singing requires one to plan laryngeal movements on the basis of anticipated target pitch events. This process may rely on auditory imagery, which has been shown to activate motor planning areas. As such, we hypothesized that poor-pitch singing, although not typically associated with deficient pitch perception, may be associated with deficient auditory imagery. Participants vocally imitated simple pitch sequences by singing, discriminated pitch pairs on the basis of pitch height, and completed an auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale). The percentage of trials participants sung in tune correlated significantly with self-reports of vividness for auditory imagery, although not with the ability to control auditory imagery. Pitch discrimination was not predicted by auditory imagery scores. The results thus support a link between auditory imagery and vocal imitation

What Do Less Accurate Singers Remember? Pitch-matching Ability and Long-term Memory for Music

We have only a partial understanding of how people remember nonverbal information such as melodies. Although once learned, melodies can be retained well over long periods of time, remembering newly presented melodies is on average quite difficult. People vary considerably, however, in their level of success in both memory situations. Here, we examine a skill we anticipated would be correlated with memory for melodies: the ability to accurately reproduce pitches. Such a correlation would constitute evidence that melodic memory involves at least covert sensorimotor codes. Experiment 1 looked at episodic memory for new melodies among non-musicians, both overall and with respect to the Vocal Memory Advantage (VMA): the superiority in remembering melodies presented as sung on a syllable compared to rendered on an instrument. Although we replicated the VMA, our prediction that better pitch matchers would have a larger VMA was not supported, although there was a modest correlation with memory for melodies presented in a piano timbre. Experiment 2 examined long-term memory for the starting pitch of familiar recorded music. Participants selected the starting note of familiar songs on a keyboard, without singing. Nevertheless, we found that better pitch-matchers were more accurate in reproducing the correct starting note. We conclude that sensorimotor coding may be used in storing and retrieving exact melodic information, but is not so useful during early encounters with melodies, as initial coding seems to involve more derived properties such as pitch contour and tonality

Automatic comparison of global children’s and adult songs supports a sensorimotor hypothesis for the origin of musical scales

Music throughout the world varies greatly, yet some musical features like scale structure display striking crosscultural similarities. Are there musical laws or biological constraints that underlie this diversity? The “vocal mistuning” hypothesis proposes that cross-cultural regularities in musical scales arise from imprecision in vocal tuning, while the integer-ratio hypothesis proposes that they arise from perceptual principles based on psychoacoustic consonance. In order to test these hypotheses, we conducted automatic comparative analysis of 100 children’s and adult songs from throughout the world. We found that children’s songs tend to have narrower melodic range, fewer scale degrees, and less precise intonation than adult songs, consistent with motor limitations due to their earlier developmental stage. On the other hand, adult and children’s songs share some common tuning intervals at small-integer ratios, particularly the perfect 5th (~3:2 ratio). These results suggest that some widespread aspects of musical scales may be caused by motor constraints, but also suggest that perceptual preferences for simple integer ratios might contribute to cross-cultural regularities in scale structure. We propose a “sensorimotor hypothesis” to unify these competing theories

Pitch Imitation Ability in Mental Transformations of Melodies

Previous research suggests that individuals with a vocal pitch imitation deficit (VPID, a.k.a. poor-pitch singers ) experience less vivid auditory images than accurate imitators (pfordresher & halpern, 2013), based on self-report. in the present research we sought to test this proposal directly by having accurate and VPID imitators produce or recognize short melodies based on their original form (untransformed), or after mentally transforming the auditory image of the melody. For the production task, group differences were largest during the untransformed imitation task. importantly, producing mental transformations of the auditory image degraded performance for all participants, but were relatively more disruptive to accurate than to VPID imitators. These findings suggest that VPID is due partly to poor initial imagery formation, as manifested by production of untransformed melodies. By contrast, producing a transformed mental image may rely on working memory ability, which is more equally matched across participants. This interpretation was further supported by correlations with self-reports of auditory imagery and measures of working memory

A Mechanism for Sensorimotor Translation in Singing: the Multi-Modal Imagery Association (MMIA) Model

WE PROPOSE A NEW FRAMEWORK TO UNDERSTAND singing accuracy, based on multi-modal imagery associations: the MMIA model. This model is based on recent data suggesting a link between auditory imagery and singing accuracy, evidence for a link between imagery and the functioning of internal models for sensorimotor associations, and the use of imagery in singing pedagogy. By this account, imagery involves automatic associations between different modalities, which in the present context comprise associations between pitch height and the regulation of vocal fold tension. Importantly, these associations are based on probabilistic relationships that may vary with respect to their precision and accuracy. We further describe how this framework may be extended to multi-modal associations at the sequential level, and how these associations develop. The model we propose here constitutes one part of a larger architecture responsible for singing, but at the same time is cast at a general level that can extend to multi-modal associations outside the domain of singing

Auditory imagery and the poor-pitch singer

Abstract The vocal imitation of pitch by singing requires one to plan laryngeal movements on the basis of anticipated target pitch events. This process may rely on auditory imagery, which has been shown to activate motor planning areas. As such, we hypothesized that poor-pitch singing, although not typically associated with deficient pitch perception, may be associated with deficient auditory imagery. Participants vocally imitated simple pitch sequences by singing, discriminated pitch pairs on the basis of pitch height, and completed an auditory imagery self-report questionnaire (the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale). The percentage of trials participants sung in tune correlated significantly with self-reports of vividness for auditory imagery, although not with the ability to control auditory imagery. Pitch discrimination was not predicted by auditory imagery scores. The results thus support a link between auditory imagery and vocal imitation

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation. However, few studies have identified clear quantitative characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD. This study investigated imitation of speech and song in English-speaking individuals with and without ASD and its modulation by age. Participants consisted of 25 autistic children and 19 autistic adults, who were compared to 25 children and 19 adults with typical development matched on age, gender, musical training, and cognitive abilities. The task required participants to imitate speech and song stimuli with varying pitch and duration patterns. Acoustic analyses of the imitation performance suggested that individuals with ASD were worse than controls on absolute pitch and duration matching for both speech and song imitation, although they performed as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching. Furthermore, the two groups produced similar numbers of pitch contour errors, pitch interval errors and time errors. Across both groups, sung pitch was imitated more accurately than spoken pitch, whereas spoken duration was imitated more accurately than sung duration. Whereas children imitated spoken pitch more accurately than adults when it came to speech stimuli, age showed no significant relationship to song imitation. These results reveal a vocal imitation deficit across speech and music domains in ASD that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching. This finding provides evidence for shared mechanisms between speech and song imitation, which involves independent implementation of relative versus absolute features