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Diversity in pitch perception revealed by task dependence

Nature Human Behaviour volume 2, pages 52–66 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

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.

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Fig. 1: Example harmonic and inharmonic tones.
Fig. 2: Task, example stimuli and results for experiments 1 and 2: pitch discrimination with pairs of synthetic tones and pairs of instrument notes.
Fig. 3: Task and results for experiment 3: melodic contour discrimination.
Fig. 4: Tasks and results for experiments 4 and 5: speech contour perception and Mandarin tone perception.
Fig. 5: Task, results and schematic of incorrect interval trials from experiment 6: familiar melody recognition.
Fig. 6: Task and results for experiments 7 and 8: sour note detection and interval pattern discrimination.
Fig. 7: Task and results for experiment 9: pitch discrimination with large pitch intervals.
Fig. 8: Task and results for experiments 10a, 10b and 11: famous speaker recognition and novel voice discrimination.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank C. Micheyl, K. Walker, B. Delgutte and the McDermott laboratory for comments on an earlier draft of this paper, D. Temperley for sharing code to generate melodies, C. Wang for assistance collecting data, V. Zhao for assistance selecting the Mandarin word pairs for experiment 5, and K. Woods for help implementing Mechanical Turk paradigms. This work was supported by a McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award to J.H.M., a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant (1R01DC014739-01A1) to J.H.M., an NIH National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders training grant (T32DC000038) in support of M.J.M. and a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship to M.J.M. The funding agencies were not otherwise involved in the research, and any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the McDonnell Foundation, NIH or NSF.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Malinda J. McPherson & Josh H. McDermott

  2. Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Malinda J. McPherson & Josh H. McDermott

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  1. Malinda J. McPherson
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M.J.M. designed the experiments, collected and analysed data and wrote the paper. J.H.M. designed the experiments and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Malinda J. McPherson.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1–9 and Supplementary Tables 1–3.

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Supplementary Data

Raw data for Experiments 1–11 reported in the main text.

Supplementary Audio Files

Sample audio files (N = 59) for Experiments 1–11 reported in the main text.

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McPherson, M.J., McDermott, J.H. Diversity in pitch perception revealed by task dependence. Nat Hum Behav 2, 52–66 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0261-8

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