Explore the vast range of titles available.

This book builds on and in many ways completes the project of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff's influential A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Like the earlier volume, this book is both a music-theoretic treatise and a contribution to the cognitive science of music. After presenting some modifications to Lerdahl and Jackendoff's original framework, the book develops a quantitative model of listeners' intuitions of the relative distances of pitches, chords, and regions from a given tonic. The model is used to derive prolongational structure, trace paths through pitch space at multiple prolongational levels, and compute patterns of tonal tension and attraction as musical events unfold. The consideration of pitch-space paths illuminates issues of musical narrative, and the treatment of tonal tension and attraction provides a technical basis for studies of musical expectation and expression. These investigations lead to a fresh theory of tonal function and reveal an underlying parallel between tonal and metrical structures. Later portions of the book apply these ideas to highly chromatic tonal as well as atonal music. In response to stylistic differences, the shape of pitch space changes and psychoacoustic features become increasingly important, while underlying features of the theory remain constant, reflecting unvarying features of the musical mind. The theory is illustrated throughout by analyses of music from Bach to Schoenberg, and frequent connections are made to the music-theoretic and psychological literature.

The relative importance of nature and nurture for various forms of expertise has been intensely debated. Music proficiency is viewed as a general model for expertise, and associations between deliberate practice and music proficiency have been interpreted as supporting the prevailing idea that long-term deliberate practice inevitably results in increased music ability. Here, we examined the associations (rs = .18–.36) between music practice and music ability (rhythm, melody, and pitch discrimination) in 10,500 Swedish twins. We found that music practice was substantially heritable (40%–70%). Associations between music practice and music ability were predominantly genetic, and, contrary to the causal hypothesis, nonshared environmental influences did not contribute. There was no difference in ability within monozygotic twin pairs differing in their amount of practice, so that when genetic predisposition was controlled for, more practice was no longer associated with better music skills. These findings suggest that music practice may not causally influence music ability and that genetic variation among individuals affects both ability and inclination to practice.

Musical training is known to modify cortical organization. Here, we show that such modifications extend to subcortical sensory structures and generalize to processing of speech. Musicians had earlier and larger brainstem responses than nonmusician controls to both speech and music stimuli presented in auditory and audiovisual conditions, evident as early as 10 ms after acoustic onset. Phase-locking to stimulus periodicity, which likely underlies perception of pitch, was enhanced in musicians and strongly correlated with length of musical practice. In addition, viewing videos of speech (lip-reading) and music (instrument being played) enhanced temporal and frequency encoding in the auditory brainstem, particularly in musicians. These findings demonstrate practice-related changes in the early sensory encoding of auditory and audiovisual information.

Previous studies have established that musical pitch and timbre (specifically, spectral shape) perceptually covary: lower pitches are associated with darker timbres (less higher-frequency energy) and higher pitches are associated with brighter timbres (more higher-frequency energy). In four experiments, perceptual sensitivity to this relationship was assessed in pitch labeling tasks when instrument timbre varied in ways that respected or violated this pattern (Consistent or Reversed trials). Performance was influenced by context at multiple timescales: block-level (stimulus type), experimental session-level (block order or configuration), and longer-term experience (musical training background). Across experiments, participants performed near ceiling accuracy for Consistent stimuli, but were less accurate for Reversed stimuli. This pattern was moderated by which condition was tested first in the experiment, the introduction of trial-by-trial feedback, and presentation of trials in blocked versus interleaved orders. Higher musical training scores were generally associated with higher accuracy on Consistent trials but were more reliably and more strongly associated with higher accuracy on Reversed trials. Thus, context on multiple timescales can shape perceptual sensitivity to the natural covariance between musical pitch and timbre. Results advance the efficient coding hypothesis by demonstrating how listener factors can modulate perceptual sensitivity to statistical structure in the acoustic environment.

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (nāzok) or thick (koloft). Differences in language were reflected in differences in performance on two pitch-reproduction tasks, even though the tasks used simple, nonlinguistic stimuli and responses. To test whether experience using language influences mental representations of pitch, we trained native Dutch speakers to describe pitch in terms of thickness, as Farsi speakers do. After the training, Dutch speakers' performance on a nonlinguistic psychophysical task resembled the performance of native Farsi speakers. People who use different linguistic space-pitch metaphors also think about pitch differently. Language can play a causal role in shaping nonlinguistic representations of musical pitch.

A number of evolutionary theories assume that music and language have a common origin as an emotional protolanguage that remains evident in overlapping functions and shared neural circuitry. The most basic prediction of this hypothesis is that sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody derives from the capacity to process music. We examined sensitivity to emotion in speech prosody in a sample of individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in processing acoustic and structural attributes of music. Twelve individuals with congenital amusia and 12 matched control participants judged the emotional expressions of 96 spoken phrases. Phrases were semantically neutral but prosodic cues (tone of voice) communicated each of six emotional states: happy, tender, afraid, irritated, sad, and no emotion. Congenitally amusic individuals were significantly worse than matched controls at decoding emotional prosody, with decoding rates for some emotions up to 20% lower than that of matched controls. They also reported difficulty understanding emotional prosody in their daily lives, suggesting some awareness of this deficit. The findings support speculations that music and language share mechanisms that trigger emotional responses to acoustic attributes, as predicted by theories that propose a common evolutionary link between these domains.

People often talk about musical pitch using spatial metaphors. In English, for instance, pitches can be \"high\" or \"low\" (i.e., height-pitch association), whereas in other languages, pitches are described as \"thin\" or \"thick\" (i.e., thickness-pitch association). According to results from psychophysical studies, metaphors in language can shape people's nonlinguistic space-pitch representations. But does language establish mappings between space and pitch in the first place, or does it only modify preexisting associations? To find out, we tested 4-month-old Dutch infants' sensitivity to height-pitch and thickness-pitch mappings using a preferential-looking paradigm. The infants looked significantly longer at cross-modally congruent stimuli for both space-pitch mappings, which indicates that infants are sensitive to these associations before language acquisition. The early presence of space-pitch mappings means that these associations do not originate from language. Instead, language builds on preexisting mappings, changing them gradually via competitive associative learning. Space-pitch mappings that are language-specific in adults develop from mappings that may be universal in infants.

Temporal envelope fluctuations of natural sounds convey critical information to speech and music processing. In particular, musical pitch perception is assumed to be primarily underlined by temporal envelope encoding. While increasing evidence demonstrates the importance of carrier fine structure to complex pitch perception, how carrier spectral information affects musical pitch perception is less clear. Here, transposed tones designed to convey identical envelope information across different carriers were used to assess the effects of carrier spectral composition to pitch discrimination and musical-interval and melody identifications. Results showed that pitch discrimination thresholds became lower (better) with increasing carrier frequencies from 1k to 10k Hz, with performance comparable to that of pure sinusoids. Musical interval and melody defined by the periodicity of sine- or harmonic complex envelopes across carriers were identified with greater than 85% accuracy even on a 10k-Hz carrier. Moreover, enhanced interval and melody identification performance was observed with increasing carrier frequency up to 6k Hz. Findings suggest a perceptual enhancement of temporal envelope information with increasing carrier spectral region in musical pitch processing, at least for frequencies up to 6k Hz. For carriers in the extended high-frequency region (8–20k Hz), the use of temporal envelope information to music pitch processing may vary depending on task requirement. Collectively, these results implicate the fidelity of temporal envelope information to musical pitch perception is more pronounced than previously considered, with ecological implications.

Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic individuals’ pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) individuals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to individual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large sample ( n  = 164) of autistic and NT children and adults. Our findings revealed that: (i) autistic individuals either showed similar or worse performance than NT individuals on the pitch tasks; (ii) cognitive abilities were associated with some pitch task performance; and (iii) cognitive abilities modulated the relationship between autism diagnosis and pitch perception on some tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of taking an individual differences approach to understand the strengths and weaknesses of pitch processing in autism.

The pitch perturbation technique is a validated technique that has been used for over 30 years to understand how people control their voice. This technique involves altering a person’s voice pitch in real-time while they produce a vowel (commonly, a prolonged /a/ sound). Although post-task changes in the voice have been observed in several studies (e.g., a change in mean f o across the duration of the experiment), the potential for using the pitch perturbation technique as a training tool for voice pitch regulation and/or modification has not been explored. The present study examined changes in event related potentials (ERPs) and voice pitch in three groups of subjects due to altered voice auditory feedback following a brief, four-day training period. Participants in the opposing group were trained to change their voice f o in the opposite direction of a pitch perturbation stimulus. Participants in the following group were trained to change their voice f o in the same direction as the pitch perturbation stimulus. Participants in the non-varying group did not voluntarily change their pitch, but instead were asked to hold their voice constant when they heard pitch perturbations. Results showed that all three types of training affected the ERPs and the voice pitch-shift response from pre-training to post-training (i.e., “hold your voice pitch steady” task; an indicator of voice pitch regulation). Across all training tasks, the N1 and P2 components of the ERPs occurred earlier, and the P2 component of the ERPs occurred with larger amplitude post-training. The voice responses also occurred earlier but with a smaller amplitude following training. These results demonstrate that participation in pitch-shifted auditory feedback tasks even for brief periods of time can modulate the automatic tendency to compensate for alterations in voice pitch feedback and has therapeutic potential.