Papers selected by Waka Fujisaki

　　　■Multiple coding strategies in the retention of musical tones by possessors of absolute pitch
　　　■The stimulus duration required to identify vowels, their octave, and their pitch chroma
　　　■Illusory Conjunctions of Pitch and Duration in Unfamiliar Tone Sequences
　　　■Recognition of musical key: Exploratory study
　　　■Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in Humans

Multiple coding strategies in the retention of musical tones by possessors of absolute pitch

Robert J. Zattore & Christine Beckett
Memory & Cognition 1989, 17(5), 582-589

Eighteen musicians with abslute pitch (AP)confirmed by screening tests participated in tonal and verbal short-term-retention tasks. In the tonal task, subjects identified three successive piano tones by their letter names. Recall of these note names after 18 sec of counting backwards was near perfect. Recall after an 18-sec delay filled with random piano tones was also near perfect. In contrast, the same subjects demonstrated significant forgetting when required to retain letter trigrams while counting backwards for 18 sec. These results were essentially replicated in a second experiment using longer (27 sec)retention intervals, a more demanding verbal interference task, and an active musical interference task(singing a descending scale). We interpret these results as indicating that retention of note names by possessors of AP is not limited to verbal encoding; rather, multiple codes(e.g., auditory, kinesthetic. and visual imagery) are probably used.

The stimulus duration required to identify vowels, their octave, and their pitch chroma

Ken Robinson & Roy D. Patterson
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 98(4), October 1995, 1858-1865

Computational models of sound segregation typically include the assumption that pitch plays a key role in timbre identifcation. This hypothesis was investigated by presenting listeners with short segments of static vowel sounds and asking them to identify the vowel quality(timbre), the octave(tone height),or the note (tone chroma) of the sound. There were four vowel categories(/a/, /i/, /u/, and /e/), four octave categories (centered on C1, C2, C3, and C4) and four note categories (C, D, E, and F), and performance was measured as a function of the number of glottal periods of the vowel sound. The results show that at all stimulus durations, it was easiest to identify the vowel quality (mean 94% correct), followed by the octave (71%), and finally the note (52 %). The results indicate that timbre can be extracted reliably from segments of vowels that are too short to support equivalent pitch judgments, be they note identification, or the less precise judgment of the octave of the sound. Thus it is unlikely that pitch plays a key role in timbre extraction, at least at short durations.

Illusory Conjunctions of Pitch and Duration in Unfamiliar Tone Sequences

William Forde Thompson, Jeff Pressing & Michael D. Hall
Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception and Performance, 2001, Vol. 27, No. 1, 128-140

In 3 experiments, the authors examined short-term memory for pitch and duration in unfamiliar tone sequences. Participants were presented a target sequence consisting of 2 tones (Experiment 1), of 7 tones (Experiment 2 and 3), and then a probe tone. Participants indicated whether the probe tone matched 1 of the target tones in both pitch and durations. Error rates were relatively low if the probe tone matched 1 of the target tones or if it differed from target tones in pitch, duration, or both. Error rates were remarkably high, however, if the probe tone combinedthe pitch of 1 target tone with the duration of a different target tone. The results suggest that illusory conjunctions of these dimentions frequently occur. A mathematical model is presented that accounts for the relative contribution of pitch errors, duration errors, and illusory conjunctions of pitch and duration.

Recognition of musical key: Exploratory study

Ernst Terhardt & W. Dixon Ward
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 72(1), July 1982

The initial 5s of each of the 12 major-key preludes from J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavichord was recorded by an expert pianist, either as written or shifted by plus / minus 1, 4, 6, or 7 semitones, and a randomized tape consisting of two repetitions of each of the 108 items was prepared. Twenty musicians, mostly pianists, and two nonmusicians judged whether each item was played in the correct key, transposed up, or transposed down; a simplified version of original(correct)score was printed on the answer sheet. Only four subjects failed to discriminate, at the 5% confidence level, the correct rendition from the transposed ones, even when only the +-1-semitone transpositions are considered. Errors are dependent on the "linear distance" of transposition (i.e., pitch height offset) rather than "harmonic distance"(i.e., offset on the circle of fifth). The subjects claiming to possess absolute pitch performed slightly better than the best of the nonpossessors, but the results suggest that absolute identification of tonality is an ability that is more widespread than commonly supposed.

Genetic Correlates of Musical Pitch Recognition in Humans

Dennis Drayna, Any Manichaikul, Marlies de Lange, Harold Snieder, Tim Spector
SCIENCE VOL 291 9 MARCH 2001 1969-1972

We used a twin study to investigate the genetic and environmental contributions to differences in musical pitch perception abilities in humans. We administered a Distorted Tunes Test(DTT), which requires subjects to judge whether simple popular melodies contain notes with incorrect pitch, to 136 monozygotic twin pairs and 148 dizygotic twin pairs. The correlation of DTT scores between twins was estimated at 0.67 for monozygotic pairs and 0.44 for dizygotic pairs. Genetic model-fitting techniques supported an additive genetic model, with heritability estimated at 0.71 to 0.80, depending on how subjects were categorized, and with no effect of shared environmet. DTT scores were only weakly correlated with measures of peripheral hearing. This suggests that variation in musical pitch recognition is primarily due to highly heritable differences in auditory functions not tested by conventional audiologic methods.