Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

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.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the ability to identify and name the pitch of a sound without external reference. Often, accuracy and speed at naming isolated musical pitches are correlated with demographic, biological, and acoustical parameters to gain insight into the genesis and evolution of this ability in specific cohorts. However, the majority of those studies were conducted in North America, Europe, or Asia. To fill this gap, here we investigated the pitch-naming performance in a large population of Brazilian conservatory musicians ( = 200). As previously shown, we found that the population performance was rather a continuum than an \" \" ability. By comparing the observed distribution of correct responses to a theoretical binomial distribution, we estimated the prevalence of AP as being 18% amongst regular music students. High accuracy thresholds (e.g., 85% of correct responses) yielded a prevalence of 4%, suggesting that AP might have been underestimated in previous reports. Irrespective of the threshold used, AP prevalence was higher in musicians who started their musical practice and formal musical education early in life. Finally, we compared the performance of those music students (average proficiency group) with another group of students selected to take part in the conservatory orchestra (high proficiency group, = 30). Interestingly, the prevalence of AP was higher in the latter in comparison to the former group. In addition, even when the response was incorrect, the mean absolute deviation from the correct response was smaller in the high proficiency group compared to the average proficiency group (Glass's Δ: 0.5). Taken together, our results show that the prevalence of AP in Brazilian students is similar to other non-tonal language populations, although this measure is highly dependent on the scoring threshold used. Despite corroborating that early involvement with musical practice and formal education can foster AP ability, the present data suggest that music proficiency may also play an important role in AP expression.

Perception is thought to be shaped by the environments for which organisms are optimized. These influences are difficult to test in biological organisms but may be revealed by machine perceptual systems optimized under different conditions. We investigated environmental and physiological influences on pitch perception, whose properties are commonly linked to peripheral neural coding limits. We first trained artificial neural networks to estimate fundamental frequency from biologically faithful cochlear representations of natural sounds. The best-performing networks replicated many characteristics of human pitch judgments. To probe the origins of these characteristics, we then optimized networks given altered cochleae or sound statistics. Human-like behavior emerged only when cochleae had high temporal fidelity and when models were optimized for naturalistic sounds. The results suggest pitch perception is critically shaped by the constraints of natural environments in addition to those of the cochlea, illustrating the use of artificial neural networks to reveal underpinnings of behavior. The neural and computational mechanisms underpinning pitch perception remain unclear. Here, the authors trained deep neural networks to estimate the fundamental frequency of sounds and found that human pitch perception depends on precise spike timing in the auditory nerve, but is also adapted to the statistical tendencies of natural sounds.

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.

It is well known that non-human animals respond to information encoded in vocal signals, and the same can be said of humans. Specifically, human voice pitch affects how speakers are perceived. As such, does voice pitch affect how we perceive and select our leaders? To answer this question, we recorded men and women saying ‘I urge you to vote for me this November’. Each recording was manipulated digitally to yield a higher- and lower-pitched version of the original. We then asked men and women to vote for either the lower- or higher-pitched version of each voice. Our results show that both men and women select male and female leaders with lower voices. These findings suggest that men and women with lower-pitched voices may be more successful in obtaining positions of leadership. This might also suggest that because women, on average, have higher-pitched voices than men, voice pitch could be a factor that contributes to fewer women holding leadership roles than men. Additionally, while people are free to choose their leaders, these results clearly demonstrate that these choices cannot be understood in isolation from biological influences.

Absolute pitch (AP) is the rare ability to name any musical note without the use of a reference note. Given that genuine AP representations are based on the identification of isolated notes by their tone chroma , they are considered to be invariant to (1) surrounding tonal context, (2) changes in instrumental timbre, and (3) changes in octave register. However, there is considerable variability in the literature in terms of how AP is trained and tested along these dimensions, making recent claims about AP learning difficult to assess. Here, we examined the effect of tonal context on participant success with a single-note identification training paradigm, including how learning generalized to an untested instrument and octave. We found that participants were able to rapidly learn to distinguish C from other notes, with and without feedback and regardless of the tonal context in which C was presented. Participants were also able to partly generalize this skill to an untrained instrument. However, participants displayed the weakest generalization in recognizing C in a higher octave. The results indicate that participants were likely attending to pitch height in addition to pitch chroma – a conjecture that was supported by analyzing the pattern of response errors. These findings highlight the complex nature of note representation in AP, which requires note identification across contexts, going beyond the simple storage of a note fundamental. The importance of standardizing testing that spans both timbre and octave in assessing AP and further implications on past literature and future work are discussed.

In tonal languages, which are spoken by nearly one-third of the world’s population, speakers precisely control the tension of vocal folds in the larynx to modulate pitch in order to distinguish words with completely different meanings. The specific pitch trajectories for a given tonal language are called lexical tones. Here, we used high-density direct cortical recordings to determine the neural basis of lexical tone production in native Mandarin-speaking participants. We found that instead of a tone category-selective coding, local populations in the bilateral laryngeal motor cortex (LMC) encode articulatory kinematic information to generate the pitch dynamics of lexical tones. Using a computational model of tone production, we discovered two distinct patterns of population activity in LMC commanding pitch rising and lowering. Finally, we showed that direct electrocortical stimulation of different local populations in LMC evoked pitch rising and lowering during tone production, respectively. Together, these results reveal the neural basis of vocal pitch control of lexical tones in tonal languages. In tonal languages, modulation of pitch distinguishes words with different meaning. Here the authors investigate neural mechanisms of pitch control during lexical tone production in Mandarin-speaking participants.

Melodies, speech, and other stimuli that vary in pitch are processed largely in terms of the relative pitch differences between sounds. Relative representations permit recognition of pitch patterns despite variations in overall pitch level between instruments or speakers. A key component of relative pitch is the sequence of pitch increases and decreases from note to note, known as the melodic contour. Here we report that contour representations are also produced by patterns in loudness and brightness (an aspect of timbre). The representations of contours in different dimensions evidently have much in common, as contours in one dimension can be readily recognized in other dimensions. Moreover, contours in loudness and brightness are nearly as useful as pitch contours for recognizing familiar melodies that are normally conveyed via pitch. Our results indicate that relative representations via contour extraction are a general feature of the auditory system, and may have a common central locus.

This study investigates the musical perception skills of dogs through playback experiments. Dogs were trained to distinguish between two different target locations based on a sequence of four ascending or descending notes. A total of 16 dogs of different breeds, age, and sex, but all of them with at least basic training, were recruited for the study. Dogs received training from their respective owners in a suitable environment within their familiar home settings. The training sequence consisted of notes [Do-Mi-Sol#-Do (C7-E7-G7#-C8; Hz frequency: 2093, 2639, 3322, 4186)] digitally generated as pure sinusoidal tones. The training protocol comprised 3 sequential training levels, with each level consisting of 4 sessions with a minimum of 10 trials per session. In the test phase, the sequence was transposed to evaluate whether dogs used relative pitch when identifying the sequences. A correct response by the dog was recorded as 1, while an incorrect response, occurring when the dog chose the opposite zone of the bowl, was marked as 0. Statistical analyses were performed using a binomial test. Among 16 dogs, only two consistently performed above the chance level, demonstrating the ability to recognize relative pitch, even with transposed sequences. This study suggests that dogs may have the ability to attend to relative pitch, a critical aspect of human musicality.