Posts tagged pitch
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Neuroscientists study our love for deep bass sounds
Have you ever wondered why bass-range instruments tend to lay down musical rhythms, while instruments with a higher pitch often handle the melody?
According to new research from Laurel Trainor and colleagues at the McMaster Institute for Music and The Mind, this is no accident, but rather a result of the physiology of hearing.
In other words, when the bass is loud and rock solid, we have an easier time following along to the rhythm of a song.
Researchers uncover why there is a mapping between pitch and elevation
Have you ever wondered why most natural languages invariably use the same spatial attributes – high versus low – to describe auditory pitch? Or why, throughout the history of musical notation, high notes have been represented high on the staff? According to a team of neuroscientists from Bielefeld University, the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and the Bernstein Center Tübingen, high pitched sounds feel ‘high’ because, in our daily lives, sounds coming from high elevations are indeed more likely to be higher in pitch. This study has just appeared in the science journal PNAS.
Dr. Cesare Parise and colleagues set out to investigate the origins of the mapping between sound frequency and spatial elevation by combining three separate lines of evidence. First of all, they recorded and analyzed a large sample of sounds from the natural environment and found that high frequency sounds are more likely to originate from high positions in space. Next, they analyzed the filtering of the human outer ear and found that, due to the convoluted shape of the outer ear – the pinna – sounds coming from high positions in space are filtered in such a way that more energy remains for higher pitched sounds. Finally, they asked humans in a behavioural experiment to localize sounds with different frequency and found that high frequency sounds were systematically perceived as coming from higher positions in space.
The results from these three lines of evidence were highly convergent, suggesting that all such diverse phenomena as the acoustics of the human ear, the universal use of spatial terms for describing pitch, or the reason why high notes are represented higher in musical notation ultimately reflect the adaptation of human hearing to the statistics of natural auditory scenes. ‘These results are especially fascinating, because they do not just explain the origin of the mapping between frequency and elevation,’ says Parise, ‘they also suggest that the very shape of the human ear might have evolved to mirror the acoustic properties of the natural environment. What is more, these findings are highly applicable and provide valuable guidelines for using pitch to develop more effective 3D audio technologies, such as sonification-based sensory substitution devices, sensory prostheses, and more immersive virtual auditory environments.’
The mapping between pitch and elevation has often been considered to be metaphorical, and cross-sensory correspondences have been theorized to be the basis for language development. The present findings demonstrate that, at least in the case of the mapping between pitch and elevation, such a metaphorical mapping is indeed embodied and based on the statistics of the environment, hence raising the intriguing hypothesis that language itself might have been influenced by a set of statistical mappings between naturally occurring sensory signals.
Besides the mapping between pitch and elevation, human perception, cognition, and action are laced with seemingly arbitrary correspondences, such as that yellow–reddish colors are associated with a warm temperature or that sour foods taste sharp. This study suggests that many of these seemingly arbitrary mappings might in fact reflect statistical regularities to be found in the natural environment.
Pronunciation of ‘s’ sounds impacts perception of gender
A person’s style of speech — not just the pitch of his or her voice — may help determine whether the listener perceives the speaker to be male or female, according to a University of Colorado Boulder researcher who studied transgender people transitioning from female to male.
The way people pronounce their “s” sounds and the amount of resonance they use when speaking contributes to the perception of gender, according to Lal Zimman, whose findings are based on research he completed while earning his doctoral degree from CU-Boulder’s linguistics department.
Zimman presented his research on Saturday, January 5th at the 2013 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Boston.
“In the past, gender differences in the voice have been understood, primarily, as a biological difference,” Zimman said. “I really wanted to look at the potential for other factors, other than how testosterone lowers the voice, to affect how a person’s voice is perceived.”
As part of the process of transitioning from female to male, participants in Zimman’s study were treated with the hormone testosterone, which causes a number of physical changes including the lowering of a person’s voice. Zimman was interested in whether the style of a person’s speech had any impact on how low a voice needed to drop before it was perceived as male.
What he found was that a voice could have a higher pitch and still be perceived as male if the speaker pronounced “s” sounds in a lower frequency, which is achieved by moving the tongue farther away from the teeth.
“A high-frequency ‘s’ has long been stereotypically associated with women’s speech, as well as gay men’s speech, yet there is no biological correlate to this association,” said CU-Boulder linguistics and anthropology Associate Professor Kira Hall, who served as Zimman’s doctoral adviser. “The project illustrates the socio-biological complexity of pitch: the designation of a voice as more masculine or more feminine is importantly influenced by other ideologically charged speech traits that are socially, not biologically, driven.”
Vocal resonance also affected the perception of gender in Zimman’s study. A deeper resonance — which can be thought of as a voice that seems to be emanating from the chest instead of from the head — is the result of both biology and practice. Resonance is lower for people whose larynx is deeper in their throats, but people learn to manipulate the position of their larynx when they’re young, with male children pulling their larynxes down a little bit and female children pushing them up, Zimman said.
For his study, Zimman recorded the voices of 15 transgender men, all of whom live in the San Francisco Bay area. To determine the frequency of the “s” sounds each participant made, Zimman used software developed by fellow linguists. Then, to see how the “s” sounds affected perception, Zimman digitally manipulated the recording of each participant’s voice, sliding the pitch from higher to lower, and asked a group of 10 listeners to identify the gender of the speaker. Using the recordings, Zimman was able to pinpoint how low each individual’s voice had to drop before the majority of the group perceived the speaker to be male.
Perfect Pitch: Knowing the Note May Be in Your Genes
People with perfect pitch seem to possess their own inner pitch pipe, allowing them to sing a specific note without first hearing a reference tone. This skill has long been associated with early and extensive musical training, but new research suggests that perfect pitch may have as much to do with genetics as it does with learning an instrument or studying voice.
Previous research does draw a connection between early musical training and the likelihood of a person developing perfect pitch, which is also referred to as absolute pitch. This is especially true among speakers of tonal languages, such as Mandarin. Speakers of English and other non-tonal languages are far less likely to develop perfect pitch, even if they were exposed to early and extensive musical training.
“We have wondered if perfect pitch is as much about nature or nurture,” said Diana Deutsch, a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. “What is clear is that musically trained individuals who speak a non-tone language can acquire absolute pitch, but it is still a remarkably rare talent. What has been less clear is why most others with equivalent musical training do not.” Deutsch and her colleague Kevin Dooley present their findings at the 164th meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), held Oct. 22 – 26 in Kansas City, Missouri.
To shine light on this question, the researchers studied 27 English speaking adults, 7 of whom possessed perfect pitch. All began extensive musical training at or before the age of 6. The researchers tested the subjects’ memory ability using a test known as the digit span, which measures how many digits a person can hold in memory and immediately recall in correct order. They presented the digits either visually or auditorily; for the auditory test, the subject listened to the numbers through headphones, and for the visual test the digits were presented successively at the center of a computer screen.
The people with perfect pitch substantially outperformed the others in the audio portion of the test. In contrast, for the visual test, the two groups exhibited very similar performance, and their scores were not significantly different from each other. This is significant because other researchers have shown previously that auditory digit span has a genetic component.
“Our finding therefore shows that perfect pitch is associated with an unusually large memory span for speech sounds,” said Deutsch, “which in turn could facilitate the development of associations between pitches and their spoken languages early in life.”
(Source: newswise.com)
Measuring the Evolution of Contemporary Western Popular Music
Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners’ attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains formally unknown. Here we unveil a number of patterns and metrics characterizing the generic usage of primary musical facets such as pitch, timbre, and loudness in contemporary western popular music. Many of these patterns and metrics have been consistently stable for a period of more than fifty years. However, we prove important changes or trends related to the restriction of pitch transitions, the homogenization of the timbral palette, and the growing loudness levels. This suggests that our perception of the new would be rooted on these changing characteristics. Hence, an old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness.