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Short- and long-term memory for pitch and non-pitch contours: Insights from congenital amusia
Abstract
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in music perception, including discriminating and remembering melodies and melodic contours. As non-amusic listeners can perceive contours in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness, our present study investigated whether amusics' pitch contour deficits also extend to these other auditory dimensions. Amusic and control participants performed an identification task for ten familiar melodies and a short-term memory task requiring the discrimination of changes in the contour of novel four-tone melodies. For both tasks, melodic contour was defined by pitch, brightness, or loudness. Amusic participants showed some ability to extract contours in all three dimensions. For familiar melodies, amusic participants showed impairment in all conditions, perhaps reflecting the fact that the long-term memory representations of the familiar melodies were defined in pitch. In the contour discrimination task with novel melodies, amusic participants exhibited less impairment for loudness-based melodies than for pitch- or brightness-based melodies, suggesting some specificity of the deficit for spectral changes, if not for pitch alone. The results suggest pitch and brightness may not be processed by the same mechanisms as loudness, and that short-term memory for loudness contours may be spared to some degree in congenital amusia.
... Although impaired short-term memory for music and other nonverbal sounds (i.e., timbre) has been observed for individuals with congenital amusia in numerous studies (Tillmann et al., 2009(Tillmann et al., , 2016, far fewer studies have examined long-term memory. Congenital amusics recognize familiar songs (without lyrics) above chance levels, but their performance is impaired relative to controls (open-set naming in Ayotte et al., 2002; closed-set naming in Graves et al., 2019). Specifically, compared with controls, the ability of amusic participants to identify a familiar melody based on its pitch contour is impaired, as is recognition based on brightness or loudness contours (Graves et al., 2019). ...
... Congenital amusics recognize familiar songs (without lyrics) above chance levels, but their performance is impaired relative to controls (open-set naming in Ayotte et al., 2002; closed-set naming in Graves et al., 2019). Specifically, compared with controls, the ability of amusic participants to identify a familiar melody based on its pitch contour is impaired, as is recognition based on brightness or loudness contours (Graves et al., 2019). In other words, mental representations of musical features seem to be impaired in congenital amusics' long-term memory, which could lead to impairments in melodic familiarity and recognition when participants are asked to make old-new judgments . ...
... Such anecdotes are consistent with findings from laboratory-based studies. Although performance is above chance levels, amusics do poorly compared to controls in naming songs or judging their familiarity when the stimuli are well-known tunes presented without lyrics Graves et al., 2019). Our results extend these findings by providing experimental evidence of poor long-term memory (compared to controls) for music, using an implicit procedure (no intentional encoding), and unfamiliar, but real-world music. ...
Music is better recognized when it is liked. Does this association remain evident when music perception and memory are severely impaired, as in congenital amusia? We tested 11 amusic and 11 matched control participants, asking whether liking of a musical excerpt influences subsequent recognition. In an initial exposure phase, participants—unaware that their recognition would be tested subsequently—listened to 24 musical excerpts and judged how much they liked each excerpt. In the test phase that followed, participants rated whether they recognized the previously heard excerpts, which were intermixed with an equal number of foils matched for mode, tempo, and musical genre. As expected, recognition was in general impaired for amusic participants compared with control participants. For both groups, however, recognition was better for excerpts that were liked, and the liking enhancement did not differ between groups. These results contribute to a growing body of research that examines the complex interplay between emotions and cognitive processes. More specifically, they extend previous findings related to amusics’ impairments to a new memory paradigm and suggest that (1) amusic individuals are sensitive to an aesthetic and subjective dimension of the music-listening experience, and (2) emotions can support memory processes even in a population with impaired music perception and memory.
... Congenital amusia is generally thought of as a disorder affecting pitch perception (Peretz, 2016;Cousineau, Oxenham, & Peretz, 2015; and the perception of timbral cues relating to the frequency content of sounds (Graves et al., 2019;Marin, Gingras, & Stewart, 2012), leaving intact other capabilities, such as memory for speech stimuli Tillmann, Schulze, & Foxton, 2009), and with more restricted or conditional deficits for other musical attributes, like rhythm (Foxton, Nandy, & Griffiths, 2006;Hyde & Peretz, 2004) and loudness (Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann, Lévêque, Fornoni, Albouy, & Caclin, 2016). However, a recent study ( Whiteford & Oxenham, 2017) found that amusic individuals were also impaired at detecting amplitude modulation (AM) as well as frequency modulation, suggesting that the deficit may not be limited to cues related to pitch and timbre. ...
... Congenital amusia is generally thought of as a disorder affecting pitch perception (Peretz, 2016;Cousineau, Oxenham, & Peretz, 2015; and the perception of timbral cues relating to the frequency content of sounds (Graves et al., 2019;Marin, Gingras, & Stewart, 2012), leaving intact other capabilities, such as memory for speech stimuli Tillmann, Schulze, & Foxton, 2009), and with more restricted or conditional deficits for other musical attributes, like rhythm (Foxton, Nandy, & Griffiths, 2006;Hyde & Peretz, 2004) and loudness (Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann, Lévêque, Fornoni, Albouy, & Caclin, 2016). However, a recent study ( Whiteford & Oxenham, 2017) found that amusic individuals were also impaired at detecting amplitude modulation (AM) as well as frequency modulation, suggesting that the deficit may not be limited to cues related to pitch and timbre. ...
... However, perhaps more likely, it may be a secondary result of impoverished spectral information, in which amusics develop relatively heightened representations of early information from sources that remain available. This phenomenon may also explain why amusic individuals remain able to use acoustic cues, such as loudness (Graves et al., 2019) or nonspectral cues for prosody . Under this explanation, the increased emphasis on beating cues could be compared with some examples of enhanced visual perception for people with profound hearing loss (e.g., Bottari, Caclin, Giard, & Pavani, 2011;Bernstein, Demorest, & Tucker, 2000), or to enhanced auditory perception for people with low vision (e.g., Kolarik, Cirstea, Pardhan, & Moore, 2014). ...
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). Amusic individuals have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusic and control participants; however, in controls, there was a tendency toward larger MMNs for inharmonicity than for beating cues, whereas the opposite tendency was observed for the amusic participants. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of nonspectral (beating) cues may be increased for amusic individuals.
... In a similar vein, the experience of earworms seems to hinge on both auditory memory and long-term memory representations, with the elements that comprise an earworm (e.g., the melody) being both familiar and relatively short in duration (Beaman & Williams, 2010). People with amusia have preserved short-term memory for words (Tillmann et al., 2009), a normal digit span (Williamson & Stewart, 2010), intact memory recognition of voices and environmental sounds Peretz et al., 2002), and perhaps preserved short-term memory for changes of loudness (Graves et al., 2019), but display short-and long-term memory deficits for musical material (Albouy et al., 2013;Gosselin et al., 2009;Graves et al., 2019;Marin et al., 2012;Tillmann et al., 2009;Tillmann, Lévêque, et al., 2016;Williamson & Stewart, 2010). In addition, although it may not be musicianship in itself that results in differences in earworm scores (Beaman & Williams, 2010;Floridou et al., 2012), more frequent and longer earworms have been associated with music training in some studies (Beaty et al., 2013;Hyman et al., 2013;Moeck et al., 2018). ...
... In a similar vein, the experience of earworms seems to hinge on both auditory memory and long-term memory representations, with the elements that comprise an earworm (e.g., the melody) being both familiar and relatively short in duration (Beaman & Williams, 2010). People with amusia have preserved short-term memory for words (Tillmann et al., 2009), a normal digit span (Williamson & Stewart, 2010), intact memory recognition of voices and environmental sounds Peretz et al., 2002), and perhaps preserved short-term memory for changes of loudness (Graves et al., 2019), but display short-and long-term memory deficits for musical material (Albouy et al., 2013;Gosselin et al., 2009;Graves et al., 2019;Marin et al., 2012;Tillmann et al., 2009;Tillmann, Lévêque, et al., 2016;Williamson & Stewart, 2010). In addition, although it may not be musicianship in itself that results in differences in earworm scores (Beaman & Williams, 2010;Floridou et al., 2012), more frequent and longer earworms have been associated with music training in some studies (Beaty et al., 2013;Hyman et al., 2013;Moeck et al., 2018). ...
... Nonetheless, open questions remain as to why amusic participants' less efficient music memory and poor pitch perception do not appear to have had a major impact on their experience of earworms. People with amusia report difficulties in recognizing familiar tunes , and recent evidence suggests that they do not store melodies in long-term memory as efficiently as controls (Graves et al., 2019). It is also surprising that less efficient auditory imagery control scores do not result in more frequent or more intrusive self-reports of earworms. ...
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder affecting various aspects of music and speech processing. Although perception and auditory imagery in the general population may share mechanisms, it is not known whether previously documented perceptual impairments in amusia are coupled with difficulties in imaging auditory objects. We employed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale (BAIS) to assess participants’ self-perceived voluntary imagery and a short earworm questionnaire to gauge their subjective experience of involuntary musical imagery. A total of 32 participants with amusia and 34 matched controls, recruited based on their performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), filled out the questionnaires in their own time. The earworm scores of amusic participants were not statistically significantly different from those of controls. By contrast, their scores on vividness and control of auditory imagery were significantly lower relative to controls. Overall, results suggest that the presence of amusia may not have an adverse effect on generating involuntary musical imagery—at the level of self-report—but still significantly reduces the individual’s self-rated voluntary imagery of musical, vocal, and environmental sounds. We discuss the findings in the light of previous research on explicit musical judgments and implicit engagement with music, while also touching on some statistical power considerations.
... Importantly, the shortterm memory deficit is restricted to the musical domain and does not affect verbal material (Albouy, Peretz, et al., 2019), including for classical tests such as forward and backward digit spans (Albouy et al., 2013;Tillmann et al., 2009;. The deficit extends to short-term memory for other spectral features (timbre features), but not to loudness (Graves et al., 2019;Marin et al., 2012). Electrophysiological and (f-)MRI studies on the cerebral underpinnings of congenital amusia have revealed functional and anatomical abnormalities in the Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) as well as in auditory areas in the temporal lobe, especially in the right hemisphere (Albouy, Mattout, et al., 2013;Hyde et al., 2006Hyde et al., , 2007Hyde et al., , 2011. ...
... We thus set out in the present study to use more complex musical material, which starts from real tonal, ecologically valid material to bring complementary evidence of the benefit of tonal structure for short-term memory in congenital amusia. Research on musical memory in congenital amusia has essentially used highly-controlled, simple short melodies, created for the study or not, composed of a single melodic line (e.g., Graves et al., 2019;Omigie et al., 2013;Quiroga-Martinez et al., 2021;Weiss & Peretz, 2019). Understanding of musical memory in congenital amusia is thus suffering from lack of data on memory for realworld music. ...
... Note that one major difference between our experimental context and musical exposition in daily life is that encoding is principally implicit in daily life, and was voluntary, in response to instructions, in our design. Interestingly, in Ayotte et al.'s study (2002), detection of tone deviants was better in familiar than in unfamiliar melodies, revealing that amusic individuals have long-term memory knowledge of musical exemplars (see also Graves et al., 2019;Quiroga-Martinez et al., 2021;Tillmann et al., 2014, in congenital amusia;and Besson & Faïta, 1995, for controls). In the present study, we show that participants have long-term memory knowledge on structures of the tonal system (see also Tillmann et al., 2012;Tillmann, Lalitte, et al., 2016) and that this type of long-term memory knowledge can also influence short-term memory performance in the amusic population as it does in control populations. ...
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of music processing, which includes impaired pitch memory, associated to abnormalities in the right fronto-temporal network. Previous research has shown that tonal structures (as defined by the Western musical system) improve short-term memory performance for short tone sequences (in comparison to atonal versions) in non-musician listeners, but the tonal structures only benefited response times in amusic individuals. We here tested the potential benefit of tonal structures for short-term memory with more complex musical material. Congenital amusics and their matched non-musician controls were required to indicate whether two excerpts were the same or different. Results confirmed impaired performance of amusic individuals in this short-term memory task. However, most importantly, both groups of participants showed better memory performance for tonal material than for atonal material. These results revealed that even amusics’ impaired short-term memory for pitch shows classical characteristics of short-term memory, that is the mnemonic benefit of structure in the to-be-memorized material. The findings show that amusic individuals have acquired some implicit knowledge of regularities of their culture, allowing for implicit processing of tonal structures, which benefits to memory even for complex material.
... Furthermore, these anatomical abnormalities associated with amusia cannot fully explain the clinical manifestations of CA. It has been reported that individuals with CA have impairments that extend to other domains, including speech perception (17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22), emotion (23)(24)(25)(26), memory (10,27,28), and visual perception (29). For example, Jiang et al. found that healthy controls (HCs) elicited a larger P600 and smaller N100 in response to inappropriate prosody compared with appropriate prosody, while no such differences in either the N100 or the P600 component were found in those with CA; this indicates that CA may affect intonation processing during speech comprehension (17). ...
... There are two reasons for this speculation. The first reason is that many studies have reported that individuals with CA have deficits in working memory (27,(59)(60)(61). For instance, Hsieh et al. demonstrated that individuals with CA performed significantly worse in working memory tasks involving probed pitch recall (61). ...
... For instance, Hsieh et al. demonstrated that individuals with CA performed significantly worse in working memory tasks involving probed pitch recall (61). Jackson et al. also suggested that the short-term storage of pitch in working memory may be affected in CA (27). Sarkamo et al. also revealed that those with acquired amusia had more severe cognitive deficits than non-amusic patients, especially in working memory and executive functioning (62). ...
Background: Congenital amusia (CA) is a rare disorder characterized by deficits in pitch perception, and many structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have been conducted to better understand its neural bases. However, a structural magnetic resonance imaging analysis using a surface-based morphology method to identify regions with cortical features abnormalities at the vertex-based level has not yet been performed.
Methods: Fifteen participants with CA and 13 healthy controls underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging. A surface-based morphology method was used to identify anatomical abnormalities. Then, the surface parameters' mean value of the identified clusters with statistically significant between-group differences were extracted and compared. Finally, Pearson's correlation analysis was used to assess the correlation between the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) scores and surface parameters.
Results: The CA group had significantly lower MBEA scores than the healthy controls (p = 0.000). The CA group exhibited a significant higher fractal dimension in the right caudal middle frontal gyrus and a lower sulcal depth in the right pars triangularis gyrus (p < 0.05; false discovery rate-corrected at the cluster level) compared to healthy controls. There were negative correlations between the mean fractal dimension values in the right caudal middle frontal gyrus and MBEA score, including the mean MBEA score (r = −0.5398, p = 0.0030), scale score (r = −0.5712, p = 0.0015), contour score (r = −0.4662, p = 0.0124), interval score (r = −0.4564, p = 0.0146), rhythmic score (r = −0.5133, p = 0.0052), meter score (r = −0.3937, p = 0.0382), and memory score (r = −0.3879, p = 0.0414). There was a significant positive correlation between the mean sulcal depth in the right pars triangularis gyrus and the MBEA score, including the mean score (r = 0.5130, p = 0.0052), scale score (r = 0.5328, p = 0.0035), interval score (r = 0.4059, p = 0.0321), rhythmic score (r = 0.5733, p = 0.0014), meter score (r = 0.5061, p = 0.0060), and memory score (r = 0.4001, p = 0.0349).
Conclusion: Individuals with CA exhibit cortical morphological changes in the right hemisphere. These findings may indicate that the neural basis of speech perception and memory impairments in individuals with CA is associated with abnormalities in the right pars triangularis gyrus and middle frontal gyrus, and that these cortical abnormalities may be a neural marker of CA.
... Congenital amusia is generally thought of as a disorder affecting pitch perception (Cousineau et al., 2015;Peretz, 2016;Tillmann et al., 2015) and timbral cues relating to the frequency content of sounds (Graves et al., 2019;Marin et al., 2012), leaving intact other capabilities, such as memory for speech stimuli Tillmann et al., 2009), and with more restricted or conditional deficits for other musical attributes, like rhythm (Foxton et al., 2006;Hyde & Peretz, 2004) and loudness (Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann et al., 2016). However, a recent study (Whiteford & Oxenham, 2017) found that amusics are impaired at detecting amplitude modulation (AM) as well as frequency modulation (FM), suggesting that the deficit may not be limited to cues related to pitch and timbre. ...
... Congenital amusia is generally thought of as a disorder affecting pitch perception (Cousineau et al., 2015;Peretz, 2016;Tillmann et al., 2015) and timbral cues relating to the frequency content of sounds (Graves et al., 2019;Marin et al., 2012), leaving intact other capabilities, such as memory for speech stimuli Tillmann et al., 2009), and with more restricted or conditional deficits for other musical attributes, like rhythm (Foxton et al., 2006;Hyde & Peretz, 2004) and loudness (Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann et al., 2016). However, a recent study (Whiteford & Oxenham, 2017) found that amusics are impaired at detecting amplitude modulation (AM) as well as frequency modulation (FM), suggesting that the deficit may not be limited to cues related to pitch and timbre. ...
... But perhaps more likely, it may be a secondary result of impoverished spectral information, in which amusics develop relatively heightened sensitivity to information sources that remain available. This phenomenon may also explain why amusics remain able to use acoustic cues, such as loudness (Graves et al., 2019) or non-spectral cues for prosody (Pralus et al., 2018). Under this explanation, the increased . ...
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). In the presence of inharmonicities or beats, amusics have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusics and controls, but while control participants showed a stronger MMN to harmonicity cues than to beating cues, amusic participants showed a stronger MMN to beating cues than to harmonicity cues. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of non-spectral cues may be increased for amusic individuals.
... Amusic individuals have neither peripheral auditory deficits nor brain lesions, but they are unable to detect out-of-key notes in a melody, and sing out-of-tune (Peretz, 2016;Barbara Tillmann et al., 2015). Pitch processing deficits were observed for amusic individuals in perception tasks, such as pitch discrimination (Hyde & Peretz, 2004) or pitch contour change detection (Peretz et al., 2003), as well as in short-term memory related to pitch (Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann, Lévêque, et al., 2016). The deficit extends to timbre (Stewart, 2011;Barbara Tillmann et al., 2009), whereas temporal processing seems to be mostly preserved in amusia (Hyde & Peretz, 2004), at least when the material does not entail pitch variations (Foxton et al., 2006;Pfeuty & Peretz, 2010). ...
... They are usually unable to sing in tune or detect an out-of-key note (see Peretz, 2016;Tillmann 44 et al., 2015 for reviews). Several studies have revealed a specific pitch processing deficit in 45 congenital amusia, with pitch perception tasks (Hyde & Peretz, 2004;Peretz et al., 2003) and 46 pitch memory tasks Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann, Lévêque, et al., 2016;47 Williamson & Stewart, 2010). The pitch deficit was observed for non-musical material, such as 48 isolated pitches or tone pairs Foxton et al., 2004;), as 49 well as tone sequences or melodies (see Tillmann et al., 2015 for a review). ...
... 194 Most of these tasks were selected on the basis of previous research investigating pitch 195 processing in congenital amusia. Congenital amusia is a deficit in music perception and 196 production, that is associated to pitch perception (review in Tillmann et al., 2015) and pitch 197 memory deficits Graves et al., 2019;Tillmann et al., 2009;Tillmann, 198 Lévêque, et al., 2016). These deficits have been traced down to an impaired fronto-temporal 199 network involved in particular in pitch encoding (Albouy et al., , 2019Albouy, Lévêque 200 et al. 2015). ...
The aim of this PhD thesis is to further characterize non-verbal auditory cognition, in particular when it is impaired. The first axis of this research focused on the investigation of emotion perception in two populations with potential deficits: in individuals with congenital amusia and patients with brain-damage. In congenital amusia, Study 1 demonstrated a deficit of emotional prosody perception. This deficit was specifically present for short vowels (versus long sentences). However, the deficit was only present in the explicit recognition task and not in the implicit intensity ratings of the same emotions. Moreover, Study 2 allowed us to relate this explicit recognition deficit with early automatic brain processing decrease by using electroencephalography. In brain-damaged patients, Study 3 demonstrated a deficit for musical emotion perception in relation with the side of the lesion. Based on these results and previous studies, we decided to design a new rehabilitation strategy for the training of non-verbal auditory cognition. In the second axis of this thesis, we focused on developing a new training strategy and chose to test this new training with cochlear implant (CI) users as this population is in high demand for better auditory cognition. We first designed a new short assessment battery for non-verbal auditory cognition. Study 4 demonstrated its efficiency to reveal specific deficits in CI users and in normal-hearing participants by using vocoded sounds. Moreover, findings revealed some evidence that audiovisual cues might help CI users to enhance their non-verbal auditory perception, as previously suggested with verbal material. We then designed a new training strategy by using multisensory integration and more specifically audiovisual stimulation. We suggest that this training could enhance non-verbal auditory abilities of CI users, but also of control participants. We aim to demonstrate the efficiency of this training in a long-term implementation by acquiring both behavioral measures (with the assessment battery developed in Study 4) in all populations with a deficit, but also magnetoencephalographic measures in control participants (Study 5). Overall, this PhD research brings further insight in the field of non-verbal auditory cognition and its associated deficits, and provides a new tool aiming to measure and remediate these deficits, which will then be useable for evaluation in clinical settings
... One population of interest in this regard are listeners with congenital amusia, a condition that disrupts the processing of pitch information. Amusic listeners are impaired in pitch discrimination, pitch memory, and pitch production Graves et al., 2019;Peretz et al., 2002). Given the pitch specificity of this condition, the question arises: do amusic listeners encode the uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, do they do it differently than normal listeners? ...
... Therefore, here we further test this idea in contexts with several degrees of complexity and familiarity. Second, because it is not entirely clear whether amusia affects processing of features other than pitch (Graves et al., 2019;Phillips-Silver et al., 2013). Notably, some behavioral research has suggested that deficits in other features, such as rhythm, appear once the stimuli become complex pitchwise (Foxton et al., 2006;Pfeuty & Peretz, 2010). ...
... Familiar stimuli consisted of seven melodic excerpts from a selection of children's songs that are well known in France (Fig. 1b) and have been used in previous research (Devergie et al., 2010;Graves et al., 2019). Each excerpt had a 4/4 meter, spanned four bars, lasted 8 seconds and was played in a G major key. ...
In typical listeners, the perceptual salience of a surprising auditory event depends on the uncertainty of its context. For example, in melodies, pitch deviants are more easily detected and generate larger neural responses when the context is highly predictable than when it is less so. However, it is not known whether amusic listeners with abnormal pitch processing are sensitive to the degree of uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, whether they are to a different extent than typical non-musician listeners. To answer this question, we manipulated the uncertainty of short melodies while participants with and without congenital amusia underwent EEG recordings in a passive listening task. Uncertainty was manipulated by presenting melodies with different levels of complexity and familiarity, under the assumption that simpler and more familiar patterns would enhance pitch predictability. We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and rhythm deviants as a measure of auditory surprise. In both participant groups, we observed reduced MMN amplitudes and longer peak latencies for all sound features with increasing levels of complexity, and putative familiarity effects only for intensity deviants. No significant group-by-complexity or group-by-familiarity interactions were detected. However, in contrast to previous studies, pitch MMN responses in amusics were disrupted in high complexity and unfamiliar melodies. The present results thus indicate that amusics are sensitive to the uncertainty of melodic sequences and that preattentive auditory change detection is greatly spared in this population across sound features and levels of predictability. However, our findings also hint at pitch-specific impairments in this population when uncertainty is high, thus suggesting that pitch processing under high uncertainty conditions requires an intact frontotemporal loop.
... Some studies have reported that it is easier to distinguish melodies when there is a contour change than when contour is preserved (e.g., Dowling & Fujitani, 1971;Dowling & Hollombe, 1977;Idson & Massaro, 1978;Peretz & Babaï, 1992;Tillmann et al., 2009). Furthermore, contour is a privileged feature for processing and storing auditory information, not only with pitch variations, but also with loudness and brightness variations (Graves et al., 2019;McDermott et al., 2008). Some related observations have been made with visual stimuli, such as with vertical lines (Balch & Muscatelli, 1986) and stair plots (Prince et al., 2009). ...
... Beyond verbal, visuospatial, and tonal materials, only few studies have investigated memory for other categories of stimuli, through recognition tasks. In the visual modality, some studies have used (1) abstract images or images that are not associated with a semantic representation (Cohen et al., 2011;Hirel et al., 2017;Tallon-Baudry et al., 1998, 2001 and (2) visual luminance variations (Aizenman et al., 2018), and in the auditory modality (1) nonmusical sounds (such as environmental sounds, Cohen et al., 2011;Thompson & Paivio, 1994), (2) loudness variations, and (3) brightness variations (Graves et al., 2019;McDermott et al., 2008). Short-term memory has been partly investigated also for other sensory modalities, such as olfaction or touch (e.g., Gallace et al., 2008;Herz & Engen, 1996). ...
... For the auditory modality, nonverbal stimuli with contour information were created with loudness variations, and not with pitch variation (to overcome the superiority of musicians in pitch discrimination abilities). Previous studies have reported that loudness variations can also create contour, by presenting a sequence of tones of constant frequency and manipulating only the intensity of each tone; in this way also the loudness interval between the tones becomes informative (i.e., the dB difference between tone pairs, Graves et al., 2019;McDermott et al., 2008). For the visual modality, nonverbal stimuli with contour information were created with luminance variations (i.e., darker vs brighter), based on the crossmodal correspondence with loudness stimuli (Marks, 1987; see Spence, 2011 for a review). ...
Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of
stimuli. Moreover, the infuence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present
study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for diferent types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can infuence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music
expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent,
visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same
recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across diferent types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians
and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether
the two sequences were identical or diferent. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging
to three diferent categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters
sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory
no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with
specifc short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli
have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented
mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.
... One population of interest in this regard are listeners with congenital amusia, a condition that disrupts the processing of pitch information. Amusic listeners are impaired in pitch discrimination, pitch memory, and pitch production Graves et al., 2019;Peretz et al., 2002). Given the pitch specificity of this condition, the question arises: do amusic listeners encode the uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, do they do it differently than normal listeners? ...
... Therefore, here we further test this idea in contexts with several degrees of complexity and familiarity. Second, because it is not entirely clear whether amusia affects processing of features other than pitch (Graves et al., 2019;Phillips-Silver et al., 2013). Notably, some behavioral research has suggested that deficits in other features, such as rhythm, appear once the stimuli become complex pitchwise (Foxton et al., 2006;Pfeuty & Peretz, 2010). ...
... Familiar stimuli consisted of seven melodic excerpts from a selection of children's songs that are well known in France (Fig. 1b) and have been used in previous research (Devergie et al., 2010;Graves et al., 2019). Each excerpt had a 4/4 meter, spanned four bars, lasted 8 seconds and was played in a G major key. ...
In typical listeners, the perceptual salience of a surprising auditory event depends on the uncertainty of its context. For example, in melodies, pitch deviants are more easily detected and generate larger neural responses when the context is highly predictable than when it is less so. However, it is not known whether amusic listeners with abnormal pitch processing are sensitive to the degree of uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, whether they are to a different extent than typical listeners. To answer this question, we manipulated the uncertainty of short melodies while participants with and without congenital amusia underwent EEG recordings in a passive listening task. Uncertainty was manipulated by presenting melodies with different levels of complexity and familiarity, under the assumption that simpler and more familiar patterns would enhance pitch predictability. We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and rhythm deviants as a measure of auditory surprise. We found reduced MMN amplitudes and longer peak latencies for all sound features with increasing levels of complexity, and putative familiarity effects only for intensity deviants. No significant group-by-complexity or group-by-familiarity interactions were detected. However, in amusics, pitch MMN responses peaked later and were disrupted in high complexity and unfamiliar melodies. Our results indicate that amusics are sensitive to the uncertainty of melodic sequences and hint at pitch-specific impairments in this population when uncertainty is high. As previous research has linked amusia with abnormal frontotemporal connectivity, our findings potentially suggest that processing pitch under high uncertainty conditions requires an intact frontotemporal loop.
... Timbre perception might thus be also affected through brightness. Indeed, deficits in short-term processing of pitch contour appear to extend to brightness contours, but not loudness contours (Graves et al., 2019), suggesting that this shared spectral mechanism may be affected in amusia. Further support for the involvement of the spectral code comes from the finding that amusics are unimpaired for pitch perception of harmonic complexes with only unresolved components (Cousineau et al., 2015), a task that likely involves extracting F0 using temporal-envelope cues, since spectrum-based cues are unavailable. ...
... Using an explicit familiar melody recognition task based on a closed set of possible melodies, Graves et al. (2019) showed that amusic participants performed significantly above chance level, even though they were impaired relative to controls. When participants were required to only judge the degree of the evoked feeling of familiarity without explicit recognition, amusics' response patterns did not differ from the ones of controls. ...
... This suggests that increased temporal envelope information with longer tone durations is helpful, especially in the spectral region where this cue is available. In general, amusics seem to exhibit greater reliance on non-spectral cues, such as amplitude modulation, loudness, and temporal-envelope-based pitch of unresolved harmonics (Cousineau et al., 2012;Cousineau et al., 2015;Graves et al., 2019Graves et al., , 2023. Indeed, when temporal envelope and spectral information are in opposition to each other, with "chimera" stimuli, amusics exhibit a greater reliance on temporal envelope cues (Bones and Wong, 2017). ...
An auditory illusion caught the world's attention recently. For the same noisy speech utterance, different people reported hearing either 'Laurel' or 'Yanny'. The dichotomy highlights how perceptions are inferences from inherently ambiguous sensory information, even though ambiguity is often unnoticed.
... We used an additional auditory memory test ('Tone pattern compare'; TP-COMP; Figure 1) to tap the active aSM components. TP-COMP is based on very similar stimuli to TP-DETECT, but involves an active, explicit delayed match to sample memory task (deliberate memorisation and recall) (Albouy et al., 2013;Graves et al., 2019;Schulze et al., 2011). Participants were required to memorise a 500 ms tone pattern (10 random 50 ms tones), actively retain it for 2 s, and compare it to a subsequently presented probe pattern. ...
... Tone Pattern Comparison (TP-COMP) task: A measure of deliberate aSM (Albouy et al., 2013;Graves et al., 2019;Schulze et al., 2011). The stimuli contained two 500 ms tone-pip sequences separated by a 2000 ms silent gap (see Figure 1). ...
A growing literature is demonstrating a link between working memory (WM) and speech-in-noise (SiN) perception. However, the nature of this correlation and which components of WM might underlie it, are being debated. We investigated how SiN reception links with auditory sensory memory (aSM) – the low-level processes that support the short-term maintenance of temporally unfolding sounds. A large sample of old ( N = 199, 60–79 yo) and young ( N = 149, 20–35 yo) participants was recruited online and performed a coordinate response measure-based speech-in-babble task that taps listeners’ ability to track a speech target in background noise. We used two tasks to investigate implicit and explicit aSM. Both were based on tone patterns overlapping in processing time scales with speech (presentation rate of tones 20 Hz; of patterns 2 Hz). We hypothesised that a link between SiN and aSM may be particularly apparent in older listeners due to age-related reduction in both SiN reception and aSM. We confirmed impaired SiN reception in the older cohort and demonstrated reduced aSM performance in those listeners. However, SiN and aSM did not share variability. Across the two age groups, SiN performance was predicted by a binaural processing test and age. The results suggest that previously observed links between WM and SiN may relate to the executive components and other cognitive demands of the used tasks. This finding helps to constrain the search for the perceptual and cognitive factors that explain individual variability in SiN performance.
... Most of these tasks were selected on the basis of previous research investigating pitch processing in congenital amusia. Congenital amusia is a deficit in music perception and production that is associated with pitch perception [77] and pitch memory deficits [75,[78][79][80][81]. These deficits have been traced down to an impaired fronto-temporal network which is involved in particular in pitch encoding [78,82,83]. ...
... These deficits have been traced down to an impaired fronto-temporal network which is involved in particular in pitch encoding [78,82,83]. Deficits in pitch change detection [84], pitch direction identification [85,86], and pitch short-term memory tasks [78,80,81] are hallmarks of the condition of congenital amusia, and we thus selected these three tasks as candidates to uncover the functioning of the combination of the peripheral auditory system and the cortical fronto-temporal network involved in pitch-related auditory cognition. Two further tests allow for the assessment of prosody perception and auditory scene analysis, as these two abilities are central in auditory non-verbal cognition and are altered in CI users, as is prosody perception in amusic participants [1,76,[87][88][89]. ...
In the case of hearing loss, cochlear implants (CI) allow for the restoration of hearing. Despite the advantages of CIs for speech perception, CI users still complain about their poor perception of their auditory environment. Aiming to assess non-verbal auditory perception in CI users, we developed five listening tests. These tests measure pitch change detection, pitch direction identification, pitch short-term memory, auditory stream segregation, and emotional prosody recognition, along with perceived intensity ratings. In order to test the potential benefit of visual cues for pitch processing, the three pitch tests included half of the trials with visual indications to perform the task. We tested 10 normal-hearing (NH) participants with material being presented as original and vocoded sounds, and 10 post-lingually deaf CI users. With the vocoded sounds, the NH participants had reduced scores for the detection of small pitch differences, and reduced emotion recognition and streaming abilities compared to the original sounds. Similarly, the CI users had deficits for small differences in the pitch change detection task and emotion recognition, as well as a decreased streaming capacity. Overall, this assessment allows for the rapid detection of specific patterns of non-verbal auditory perception deficits. The current findings also open new perspectives about how to enhance pitch perception capacities using visual cues.
... Dentro de la amusia congénita pueden detectarse varios subtipos en dependencia de que elemento se encuentre afectado: reconocimiento de escalas completas e intervalos tonales específicos o alteraciones del ritmo y métrica (Tillmann et al., 2015;. El daño neuronal en la amusia de etiología congénita, puede estar relacionado con tres posibles causas: presencia de regiones anormales de respuesta tonal en la corteza auditiva, reducción de la conectividad frontotemporal o disfunción de la corteza frontal, específicamente de la corteza prefrontal dorsolateral derecha; siendo esta última la más aceptada por los autores (Chen & Yuan, 2016, Leveque et al., 2016Graves et al., 2019). ...
La melodía, como combinación de sonidos que expresan ideas musicales, desempeña un papel crucial en el desarrollo del lenguaje y la comunicación humana. La música, reconocida como un tipo de lenguaje, tiene el poder de evocar y reforzar emociones básicas como la alegría, la tristeza y el miedo. Desde el nacimiento, las habilidades musicales comienzan a formarse, y estudios
sugieren que la estimulación sonora prenatal puede influir en la memoria
fetal y en las reacciones neuronales neonatales. La exposición temprana
a elementos musicales como el ritmo y la tonalidad contribuye al desarrollo de habilidades musicales y, secundariamente, mejora la plasticidad cortical y fortalece los circuitos cerebrales, beneficiando áreas no musicales como el habla y la atención auditiva. El reconocimiento del entorno sonoro es esencial
para la comunicación y el desarrollo individual. La lesión cerebral puede afectar esta capacidad, dando lugar a la agnosia auditiva, donde se pueden perder habilidades de reconocimiento musical o verbal. Se ha observado que las áreas cerebrales relacionadas con la percepción musical pueden variar según la experiencia musical del individuo. La asimetría de la superioridad
cerebral en la percepción musical se ha asociado con la lateralización hacia el hemisferio izquierdo en personas con formación musical. La amusia, un trastorno del procesamiento musical, puede ser congénita o adquirida debido a lesiones cerebrales. Su comprensión es crucial para los fonoaudiólogos,
quienes forman parte del equipo multidisciplinario encargado de la atención y rehabilitación de pacientes con trastornos neurológicos que afectan el lenguaje y la comunicación. La metodología utilizada para estudiar la amusia implica una investigación documental utilizando fuentes bibliográficas secundarias. Se realizó una búsqueda exhaustiva de artículos científicos relevantes, independientemente de su origen o antigüedad, y se procesó la información utilizando métodos de análisis, síntesis y deducción. En resumen, comprender la
amusia y sus implicaciones es fundamental para los profesionales de la salud, ya que ayuda a mejorar la calidad de vida de los pacientes con trastornos del lenguaje y la comunicación.
... Specifically, this effect is evident mostly in implicit, but not necessarily explicit, memory retrieval (Schmuckler, 2016). Evidence from both amusic (individuals with deficits in music perception) and neurotypical participants show that melodic contour plays a major role not only in short-term but also in long-term memory and recognition of melodies (Schubert & Stevens, 2006), even in individuals with impaired pitch perception (Graves et al., 2019). Moreover, distorted familiar melodies were recognized more frequently if the distortion preserved the contour (White, 1960). ...
Previous studies investigating common melodic contour shapes have relied on methodologies that require prior assumptions regarding the expected contour patterns. Here, a new approach for examining contour using dimensionality reduction and unsupervised machine-learning clustering methods is presented. This new methodology was tested across four sets of data-two sets of European folksongs, a mixed-style, curated dataset of Western music, and a set of Chinese folksongs. In general, the results indicate four broad common contour shapes across all four datasets: convex, concave, descending, and ascending. In addition, the analysis revealed some micro-contour tendencies, such as pitch stability at the beginning of phrases and descending pitch at phrase endings. These results are in line with previous studies of melodic contour and provide new insights regarding the prevalent contour characteristics in Western music.
... A number of studies have now revealed strong and unexpected commonalities between the perception of SFS and SE in sequences akin to melodies. These include the recognition of familiar tunes based on brightness alone [46] or the accurate discrimination of melodic patterns for both pitch and brightness [31,47,48]. These commonalities stand in sharp contrast with the qualitative differences observed between e.g. ...
Changes in the frequency content of sounds over time are arguably the most basic form of information about the behavior of sound-emitting objects. In perceptual studies, such changes have mostly been investigated separately, as aspects of either pitch or timbre. Here, we propose a unitary account of “up” and “down” subjective judgments of frequency change, based on a model combining auditory correlates of acoustic cues in a sound-specific and listener-specific manner. To do so, we introduce a generalized version of so-called Shepard tones, allowing symmetric manipulations of spectral information on a fine scale, usually associated to pitch (spectral fine structure, SFS), and on a coarse scale, usually associated timbre (spectral envelope, SE). In a series of behavioral experiments, listeners reported “up” or “down” shifts across pairs of generalized Shepard tones that differed in SFS, in SE, or in both. We observed the classic properties of Shepard tones for either SFS or SE shifts: subjective judgements followed the smallest log-frequency change direction, with cases of ambiguity and circularity. Interestingly, when both SFS and SE changes were applied concurrently (synergistically or antagonistically), we observed a trade-off between cues. Listeners were encouraged to report when they perceived “both” directions of change concurrently, but this rarely happened, suggesting a unitary percept. A computational model could accurately fit the behavioral data by combining different cues reflecting frequency changes after auditory filtering. The model revealed that cue weighting depended on the nature of the sound. When presented with harmonic sounds, listeners put more weight on SFS-related cues, whereas inharmonic sounds led to more weight on SE-related cues. Moreover, these stimulus-based factors were modulated by inter-individual differences, revealing variability across listeners in the detailed recipe for “up” and “down” judgments. We argue that frequency changes are tracked perceptually via the adaptive combination of a diverse set of cues, in a manner that is in fact similar to the derivation of other basic auditory dimensions such as spatial location.
... The final sample satisfied these requirements for CA and RL groups, but not for DYS+A and DYS-A groups, due to the great difficulty in recruiting these children. Note that our sample size still exceeds that of comparable studies conducted with these particular populations (e.g., Graves et al., 2019;Lagrois & Peretz, 2019;Lazzaro et al., 2021;Tao et al., 2019). ...
Developmental dyslexia and congenital amusia have common characteristics. Yet, their possible association in some individuals has been addressed only scarcely. Recently, two converging studies reported a sizable comorbidity rate between these two neurodevelopmental disorders (Couvignou et al., Cognitive Neuropsychology 2019; Couvignou & Kolinsky, Neuropsychologia 2021). However, the reason for their association remains unclear. Here, we investigate the hypothesis of shared underlying impairments between dyslexia and amusia. Fifteen dyslexic children with amusia (DYS+A), 15 dyslexic children without amusia (DYS-A), and two groups of 25 typically developing children matched on either chronological age (CA) or reading level (RL) were assessed with a behavioral battery aiming to investigate phonological and pitch processing capacities at auditory memory, perceptual awareness, and attentional levels. Overall, our results suggest that poor auditory serial-order memory increases susceptibility to comorbidity between dyslexia and amusia and may play a role in the development of the comorbid phenotype. In contrast, the impairments observed in the DYS+A children for auditory item memory, perceptual awareness, and attention might be a consequence of their reduced reading experience combined with weaker musical skills. Comparing DYS+A and DYS-A children suggests that the latter are more resourceful and/or have more effective compensatory strategies, or that their phenotype results from a different developmental trajectory. We will discuss the relevance of these findings for delving into the etiology of these two developmental disorders and address their implications for future research and practice.
... A number of studies have now revealed strong and unexpected commonalities between the perception of SFS and SE in sequences akin to melodies. These include the recognition of familiar tunes based on brightness alone [43] or the accurate discrimination of melodic patterns for both pitch and brightness [28,44,45]. These commonalities stand in sharp contrast with the qualitative differences observed between e.g. ...
Changes in the frequency content of sounds over time are arguably the most basic form of information about the behavior of sound-emitting objects. In perceptual studies, such changes have mostly been investigated separately, as aspects of either pitch or timbre. Here, we propose a unitary account of “up” and “down” subjective judgments of frequency change, based on a model combining auditory correlates of acoustic cues in a sound-specific and listener-specific manner. To do so, we introduce a generalized version of so-called Shepard tones, allowing symmetric manipulations of spectral information on a fine scale, usually associated to pitch (spectral fine structure, SFS), and on a coarse scale, usually associated timbre (spectral envelope, SE). In a series of behavioral experiments, listeners reported “up” or “down” shifts across pairs of generalized Shepard tones that differed in SFS, in SE, or in both. We observed the classic properties of Shepard tones for either SFS or SE shifts: subjective judgements followed the smallest log-frequency change direction, with cases of ambiguity and circularity. Interestingly, when both SFS and SE changes were applied concurrently (synergistically or antagonistically), we observed a trade-off between cues. Listeners were encouraged to report when they perceived “both” directions of change concurrently, but this rarely happened, suggesting a unitary percept. A computational model could accurately fit the behavioral data by combining different cues reflecting frequency changes after auditory filtering. The model revealed that cue weighting depended on the nature of the sound. When presented with harmonic sounds, listeners put more weight on SFS-related cues, whereas inharmonic sounds led to more weight on SE-related cues. Moreover, these stimulus-based factors were modulated by inter-individual differences, revealing variability across listeners in the detailed recipe for “up” and “down” judgments. We argue that frequency changes are tracked perceptually via the adaptive combination of a diverse set of cues, in a manner that is in fact similar to the derivation of other basic auditory dimensions such as spatial location.
... The scores of participants on singing from memory (first condition) were compared to imitation (second and third conditions taken together). It was found that imitation was an easier condition, suggesting that poor singing might be of some memory-related origin, which is consistent with amusics' documented shortterm memory deficits (e.g., Albouy et al., 2013;Gosselin et al., 2009;Tillmann et al., 2009;; but see Jiang et al., 2013, on the adverse effect of perceptual complexity on memory performance) and their possibly less efficient long-term memory storage in addition to short-term memory difficulties (Graves et al., 2019). ...
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of pitch perception that may also compromise pitch production. Despite amusics’ long documented difficulties with pitch, previous evidence suggests that familiar music may have an implicit facilitative effect on their performance. It remains, however, unknown whether vocal imitation of song in amusia is influenced by melody familiarity and the presence of lyrics. To address this issue, thirteen Mandarin speaking amusics and 13 matched controls imitated novel song segments with lyrics and on the syllable /la/. Eleven out of these participants in each group also imitated segments of a familiar song. Subsequent acoustic analysis was conducted to measure pitch and timing matching accuracy based on eight acoustic measures. While amusics showed worse imitation performance than controls across seven out of the eight pitch and timing measures, melody familiarity was found to have a favorable effect on their performance on three pitch-related acoustic measures. The presence of lyrics did not affect either group’s performance substantially. Correlations were observed between amusics’ performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia and imitation of the novel song. We discuss implications in terms of music familiarity, memory demands, the relevance of lexical information, and the link between perception and production.
... Biases in relative pitch could also account for the biases seen in basic pitch discrimination, on the assumption that the decision variable is a representation of relative pitch. The influence of coarse spectral changes on relative pitch is consistent with findings that humans extract melody-like representations from such changes (Cousineau et al., 2014;Graves et al., 2014;Graves et al., 2019;McDermott et al., 2008;Siedenburg, 2018). ...
Information in speech and music is often conveyed through changes in fundamental frequency (f0), the perceptual correlate of which is known as "pitch". One challenge of extracting this information is that such sounds can also vary in their spectral content due to the filtering imposed by a vocal tract or instrument body. Pitch is envisioned as invariant to spectral shape, potentially providing a solution to this challenge, but the extent and nature of this invariance remain poorly understood. We examined the extent to which human pitch judgments are invariant to spectral differences between natural sounds. Listeners performed up/down and interval discrimination tasks with spoken vowels, instrument notes, or synthetic tones, synthesized to be either harmonic or inharmonic (lacking a well-defined f0). Listeners were worse at discriminating pitch across different vowel and instrument sounds compared to when vowels/instruments were the same, being biased by differences in the spectral centroids of the sounds being compared. However, there was no interaction between this effect and that of inharmonicity. In addition, this bias decreased when sounds were separated by short delays. This finding suggests that the representation of a sound's pitch is itself unbiased, but that pitch comparisons between sounds are influenced by changes in timbre, the effect of which weakens over time. Pitch representations thus appears to be relatively invariant to spectral shape. But relative pitch judgments are not, even when spectral shape variation is naturalistic, and when such judgments are based on representations of the f0.
... The contribution of bottom-up aspects of pitch encoding to account for the differences between musicians and non-musicians should be minimal. Indeed, the smallest pitch changes to be detected correspond to a 2-octave shift in the global task, and equal or larger than 400 cents in the local task, which is largely higher than the justnoticeable-differences (JNDs) typically measured with isolated pure tones in naive listeners 32 . Rather, the present results can best be understood in the context of "informational masking", in line with studies reporting JNDs of several thousands hertz when measured using random tone sequences varying in large frequency ranges 33 . ...
The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local-global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local-global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of "analytic" processing acquisition in musicians.
... First, the contribution of bottom-up aspects of pitch encoding to account for the 624 differences between musicians and non-musicians should be minimal. Indeed, the 625 minimal pitch changes to be detected in our task were 400 cents (local condition with 626 k-ratio=1/3), which is higher than the just-noticeable-differences (JNDs) typically 627 measured with isolated pure tones in naive listeners (Graves et al., 2019). Rather, our 628 results can be best understood in the context of "informational masking", consistent 629 ...
The way the visual system processes different scales of spatial information has been widely studied, highlighting the dominant role of global over local processing. Recent studies addressing how the auditory system deals with local-global temporal information suggest a comparable processing scheme, but little is known about how this organization is modulated by long-term musical training, in particular regarding musical sequences. Here, we investigate how non-musicians and expert musicians detect local and global pitch changes in short hierarchical tone sequences structured across temporally-segregated triplets made of musical intervals (local scale) forming a melodic contour (global scale) varying either in one direction (monotonic) or both (non-monotonic). Our data reveal a clearly distinct organization between both groups. Non-musicians show global advantage (enhanced performance to detect global over local modifications) and global-to-local interference effects (interference of global over local processing) only for monotonic sequences, while musicians exhibit the reversed pattern for non-monotonic sequences. These results suggest that the local-global processing scheme depends on the complexity of the melodic contour, and that long-term musical training induces a prominent perceptual reorganization that reshapes its initial global dominance to favour local information processing. This latter result supports the theory of “analytic” processing acquisition in musicians.
... Some studies have reported that it is easier to distinguish melodies when there is a contour change than when contour is preserved (e.g., Dowling & Fushitani, 1971;Dowling & Hollombe, 1977;Idson & Massaro, 1978;Peretz & Babai, 1992, Tillmann et al., 2009. Recent studies have reported that contour is a privileged feature for processing and storing auditory information, not only with pitch variations, but also with loudness and brightness variations (McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2008;Graves et al., 2019). ...
Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study used the same experimental paradigm to investigate auditory and visual short-term memory for different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. Performance in this recognition (delayed-matching-to-sample) paradigm was compared for materials that were either verbal (i.e., chained syllables without meaning) or nonverbal (i.e., not easily described by verbal labels). For the latter ones, the event sequence could either entail a contour, which is a pattern of up and down changes (based on non-pitch features), or not. All materials were implemented in both auditory and visual modalities. As previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians, the recognition tasks were performed by a group of musicians and a group of non-musicians. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for the auditory no-contour stimuli and for the contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, even extending cross-modally. These findings offer new insights into the role of encoding strategies and their effect on short-term memory performance across modalities.
Contour, the "shape" of a melody defined by the direction of pitch changes, is a key feature for melodies' perception and memory. Beyond pitch, contour can also be perceived with variations of other auditory and visual dimensions, such as loudness, spatial position, or luminance. Previous findings have shown that musically trained individuals memorise contour sequences implemented without any pitch variation better than nonmusicians, notably by mentally representing them as melodies (Talamini et al., 2022). In the present study, we tested nonmusicians (N=40) to investigate whether short-term memory for visual contour sequences could be facilitated by priming the sequences with a contour-matched melody. In each trial, participants compared two luminance sequences (S1, S2) and judged whether they were the same or different. Half of the trials were preceded by a pitch sequence that matched the contour of S1. Music and pitch perception skills were also assessed. Results revealed that, on average, the primed luminance sequences were better remembered than those without the prime. Moreover, music and pitch perception skills were moderately correlated with the overall performance in the luminance short-term memory task. The present findings provide new insights into crossmodal contour perception and memory, and open new possibilities for investigating the underlying cognitive mechanisms of contour perception.
Brightness is among the most studied aspects of timbre perception. Psychoacoustically, sounds described as “bright” versus “dark” typically exhibit a high versus low frequency emphasis in the spectrum. However, relatively little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that facilitate these metaphors we listen with . Do they originate in universal magnitude representations common to more than one sensory modality? Triangulating three different interaction paradigms, we investigated using speeded classification whether intramodal, crossmodal, and amodal interference occurs when timbral brightness, as modeled by the centroid of the spectral envelope, and pitch height/visual brightness/numerical value processing are semantically congruent and incongruent. In four online experiments varying in priming strategy, onset timing, and response deadline, 189 total participants were presented with a baseline stimulus (a pitch, gray square, or numeral) then asked to quickly identify a target stimulus that is higher/lower, brighter/darker, or greater/less than the baseline after being primed with a bright or dark synthetic harmonic tone. Results suggest that timbral brightness modulates the perception of pitch and possibly visual brightness, but not numerical value. Semantically incongruent pitch height-timbral brightness shifts produced significantly slower reaction time (RT) and higher error compared to congruent pairs. In the visual task, incongruent pairings of gray squares and tones elicited slower RTs than congruent pairings (in two experiments). No interference was observed in the number comparison task. These findings shed light on the embodied and multimodal nature of experiencing timbre.
Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of music perception and production, with the observed deficits contrasting with the sophisticated music processing reported for the general population. Musical deficits within amusia have been hypothesized to arise from altered pitch processing, with impairments in pitch discrimination and, notably, short-term memory. We here review research investigating its behavioral and neural correlates, in particular the impairments at encoding, retention, and recollection of pitch information, as well as how these impairments extend to the processing of pitch cues in speech and emotion. The impairments have been related to altered brain responses in a distributed fronto-temporal network, which can be observed also at rest. Neuroimaging studies revealed changes in connectivity patterns within this network and beyond, shedding light on the brain dynamics underlying auditory cognition. Interestingly, some studies revealed spared implicit pitch processing in congenital amusia, showing the power of implicit cognition in the music domain. Building on these findings, together with audiovisual integration and other beneficial mechanisms, we outline perspectives for training and rehabilitation and the future directions of this research domain.
Traditionally, pitch variation in a sound stream has been integral to music identity. We attempt to expand music's definition, by demonstrating that the neural code for musicality is independent of pitch encoding. That is, pitchless sound streams can still induce music-like perception and a neurophysiological hierarchy similar to pitched melodies. Previous work reported that neural processing of sounds with no-pitch, fixed-pitch, and irregular-pitch (melodic) patterns, exhibits a right-lateralized hierarchical shift, with pitchless sounds favorably processed in Heschl's gyrus, ascending laterally to non-primary auditory areas for fixed-pitch and even more laterally for melodic patterns. The objective of this EEG study was to assess whether sound encoding maintains a similar hierarchical profile when musical perception is driven by timbre irregularities in the absence of pitch changes. Individuals listened to repetitions of three musical and three non-musical sound-streams. The non-musical streams were comprised of seven 200-ms segments of white, pink, or brown noise, separated by silent gaps. Musical streams were created similarly, but with all three noise types combined in a unique order within each stream to induce timbre variations and music-like perception. Subjects classified the sound streams as musical or non-musical. Musical processing exhibited right dominant alpha power enhancement, followed by a lateralized increase in theta phase-locking and spectral power. The theta phase-locking was stronger in musicians than in non-musicians. The lateralization of activity suggests higher-level auditory processing. Our findings validate the existence of a hierarchical shift, traditionally observed with pitched-melodic perception, underscoring that musicality can be achieved with timbre irregularities alone.
Involuntary musical imagery, colloquially known as “earworms”, is a phenomenon hypothesized to reflect involuntary rehearsal of long-term memory representations. Here we investigated musical earworms with a questionnaire adapted from Halpern and Bartlett (2011, Music Perception, 28(4), 425–432), both in typical individuals and in participants with congenital amusia. Congenital amusics have impaired short- and long-term musical memory, yet with evidence for preserved implicit processing of music. Almost all participants in both groups reported experiencing musical earworms, however less frequently so in amusics than in controls. In both groups, musical earworms were reported being mostly familiar music with lyrics, and consisted of music liked by the participants. Some features distinguished earworms in amusics and controls, with more limited familiarity effects in amusics. Moreover, amusics were deploying less voluntary strategies to stop the earworms, in keeping with less stable music memories in this group. In addition, we investigated verbal earworms in the same participants. Verbal earworms occurred less frequently than musical earworms, and were more frequent in amusics than in controls. However, the two types of earworms showed similar features and their frequencies of occurrence were correlated, suggesting they rely in part on domain-general processes. Implications for the understanding of involuntary auditory imagery and congenital amusia are discussed.
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing. Previous research demonstrates that although explicit musical processing is impaired in congenital amusia, implicit musical processing can be intact. However, little is known about whether implicit knowledge could improve explicit musical processing in individuals with congenital amusia. To this end, we developed a training method utilizing redescription-associate learning, aiming at transferring implicit representations of perceptual states into explicit forms through verbal description and then establishing the associations between the perceptual states reported and responses via feedback, to investigate whether explicit processing of melodic structure could be improved in individuals with congenital amusia. Sixteen amusics and 11 controls rated the degree of expectedness of melodies during EEG recording before and after training. In the interim, half of the amusics received nine training sessions on melodic structure, while the other half received no training. Results, based on effect size estimation, showed that at pretest, amusics but not controls failed to explicitly distinguish regular from irregular melodies and to exhibit an ERAN in response to irregular endings. At posttest, trained but not untrained amusics performed as well as controls at both the behavioral and neural levels. At the 3-month follow-up, the training effects still maintained. These findings present novel electrophysiological evidence of neural plasticity in the amusic brain, suggesting that redescription-associate learning may be an effective method to remediate impaired explicit processes for individuals with other neurodevelopmental disorders who have intact implicit knowledge.
Information in speech and music is often conveyed through changes in fundamental frequency (f0), perceived by humans as “relative pitch”. Relative pitch judgments are complicated by two facts. First, sounds can simultaneously vary in timbre due to filtering imposed by a vocal tract or instrument body. Second, relative pitch can be extracted in two ways: by measuring changes in constituent frequency components from one sound to another, or by estimating the f0 of each sound and comparing the estimates. We examined the effects of timbral differences on relative pitch judgments, and whether any invariance to timbre depends on whether judgments are based on constituent frequencies or their f0. Listeners performed up/down and interval discrimination tasks with pairs of spoken vowels, instrument notes, or synthetic tones, synthesized to be either harmonic or inharmonic. Inharmonic sounds lack a well-defined f0, such that relative pitch must be extracted from changes in individual frequencies. Pitch judgments were less accurate when vowels/instruments were different compared to when they were the same, and were biased by the associated timbre differences. However, this bias was similar for harmonic and inharmonic sounds, and was observed even in conditions where judgments of harmonic sounds were based on f0 representations. Relative pitch judgments are thus not invariant to timbre, even when timbral variation is naturalistic, and when such judgments are based on representations of f0.
Pitch and timbre are two primary features of auditory perception that are generally considered independent. However, an increase in pitch (produced by a change in fundamental frequency) can be confused with an increase in brightness (an attribute of timbre related to spectral centroid) and vice versa. Previous work indicates that pitch and timbre are processed in overlapping regions of the auditory cortex, but are separable to some extent via multivoxel pattern analysis. Here, we tested whether attention to one or other feature increases the spatial separation of their cortical representations and if attention can enhance the cortical representation of these features in the absence of any physical change in the stimulus. Ten human subjects (four female, six male) listened to pairs of tone triplets varying in pitch, timbre, or both and judged which tone triplet had the higher pitch or brighter timbre. Variations in each feature engaged common auditory regions with no clear distinctions at a univariate level. Attending to one did not improve the separability of the neural representations of pitch and timbre at the univariate level. At the multivariate level, the classifier performed above chance in distinguishing between conditions in which pitch or timbre was discriminated. The results confirm that the computations underlying pitch and timbre perception are subserved by strongly overlapping cortical regions, but reveal that attention to one or other feature leads to distinguishable activation patterns even in the absence of physical differences in the stimuli.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Although pitch and timbre are generally thought of as independent auditory features of a sound, pitch height and timbral brightness can be confused for one another. This study shows that pitch and timbre variations are represented in overlapping regions of auditory cortex, but that they produce distinguishable patterns of activation. Most importantly, the patterns of activation can be distinguished based on whether subjects attended to pitch or timbre even when the stimuli remained physically identical. The results therefore show that variations in pitch and timbre are represented by overlapping neural networks, but that attention to different features of the same sound can lead to distinguishable patterns of activation.
Behavioral and neuropsychological studies have suggested that tonal and verbal short-term memory are supported by specialized neural networks. To date however, neuroimaging investigations have failed to confirm this hypothesis. In this study, we investigated the hypothesis of distinct neural resources for tonal and verbal memory by comparing typical nonmusician listeners to individuals with congenital amusia, who exhibit pitch memory impairments with preserved verbal memory. During fMRI, amusics and matched controls performed delayed-matchto-sample tasks with tones and words and perceptual control tasks with the same stimuli. For tonal maintenance, amusics showed decreased activity in the right auditory cortex, inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and dorso-lateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Moreover, they exhibited reduced right-lateralized functional connectivity between the auditory cortex and the IFG during tonal encoding and between the IFG and the DLPFC during tonal maintenance. In contrasts, amusics showed no difference compared with the controls for verbal memory, with activation in the left IFG and left fronto-temporal connectivity. Critically, we observed a group-by-material interaction in right fronto-temporal regions: while amusics recruited these regions less strongly for tonal memory than verbal memory, control participants showed the reversed pattern (tonal > verbal). By benefitting from the rare condition of amusia, our findings suggest specialized cortical systems for tonal and verbal short-term memory in the human brain.
The neural correlates of music perception were studied by measuring cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes with positron emission tomography (PET). Twelve volunteers were scanned using the bolus water method under four separate conditions: (1) listening to a sequence of noise bursts, (2) listening to unfamiliar tonal melodies, (3) comparing the pitch of the first two notes of the same set of melodies, and (4) comparing the pitch of the first and last notes of the melodies. The latter two conditions were designed to investigate short-term pitch retention under low or high memory load, respectively. Subtraction of the obtained PET images, superimposed on matched MRI scans, provides anatomical localization of CBF changes associated with specific cognitive functions. Listening to melodies, relative to acoustically matched noise sequences, resulted in CBF increases in the right superior temporal and right occipital cortices. Pitch judgments of the first two notes of each melody, relative to passive listening to the same stimuli, resulted in right frontal-lobe activation. Analysis of the high memory load condition relative to passive listening revealed the participation of a number of cortical and subcortical regions, notably in the right frontal and right temporal lobes, as well as in parietal and insular cortex. Both pitch judgment conditions also revealed CBF decreases within the left primary auditory cortex. We conclude that specialized neural systems in the right superior temporal cortex participate in perceptual analysis of melodies; pitch comparisons are effected via a neural network that includes right prefrontal cortex, but active retention of pitch involves the interaction of right temporal and frontal cortices.
Individuals with congenital amusia usually exhibit impairments in melodic contour processing when asked to compare pairs of melodies that may or may not be identical to one another. However, it is unclear whether the impairment observed in contour processing is caused by an impairment of pitch discrimination, or is a consequence of poor pitch memory. To help resolve this ambiguity, we designed a novel Self-paced Audio-visual Contour Task (SACT) that evaluates sensitivity to contour while placing minimal burden on memory. In this task, participants control the pace of an auditory contour that is simultaneously accompanied by a visual contour, and they are asked to judge whether the two contours are congruent or incongruent. In Experiment 1, melodic contours varying in pitch were presented with a series of dots that varied in spatial height. Amusics exhibited reduced sensitivity to audio-visual congruency in comparison to control participants. To exclude the possibility that the impairment arises from a general deficit in cross-modal mapping, Experiment 2 examined sensitivity to cross-modal mapping for two other auditory dimensions: timbral brightness and loudness. Amusics and controls were significantly more sensitive to large than small contour changes, and to changes in loudness than changes in timbre. However, there were no group differences in cross-modal mapping, suggesting that individuals with congenital amusia can comprehend spatial representations of acoustic information. Taken together, the findings indicate that pitch contour processing in congenital amusia remains impaired even when pitch memory is relatively unburdened.
CONGENITAL AMUSIA IS A LIFELONG DISORDER OF musical processing for which no effective treatments have been found. The present study aimed to treat amusics' impairments in pitch direction identification through auditory training. Prior to training, twenty Chinese-speaking amusics and 20 matched controls were tested on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) and two psychophysical pitch threshold tasks for identification of pitch direction in speech and music. Subsequently, ten of the twenty amusics undertook 10 sessions of adaptive-tracking pitch direction training, while the remaining 10 received no training. Post training, all amusics were retested on the pitch threshold tasks and on the three pitch-based MBEA subtests. Trained amusics demonstrated significantly improved thresholds for pitch direction identification in both speech and music, to the level of non-amusic control participants, although no significant difference was observed between trained and untrained amusics in the MBEA subtests. This provides the first clear positive evidence for improvement in pitch direction processing through auditory training in amusia. Further training studies are required to target different deficit areas in congenital amusia, so as to reveal which aspects of improvement will be most beneficial to the normal functioning of musical processing.
Significance statement:
Pitch and timbre are two crucial aspects of auditory perception. Pitch governs our perception of musical melodies and harmonies, and conveys both prosodic and (in tone languages) lexical information in speech. Brightness - an aspect of timbre or sound quality - allows us to distinguish different musical instruments and speech sounds. Frequency-mapping studies have revealed tonotopic organization in primary auditory cortex, but the use of pure tones or noise bands has precluded the possibility of dissociating pitch from brightness. Our results suggest a distributed code, with no clear anatomical distinctions between auditory cortical regions responsive to changes in either pitch or timbre, but also reveal a population code that can differentiate between changes in either dimension within the same cortical regions.
Congenital amusia, a neuro-developmental disorder of music perception and production, has been associated to abnormal anatomical and functional connectivity in a right fronto-temporal pathway. To investigate whether spontaneous connectivity in brain networks involving the auditory cortex is altered in the amusic brain, we ran a seed-based connectivity analysis, contrasting rest functional MRI data of amusic and matched control participants. Our results reveal reduced fronto-temporal connectivity in amusia during resting state, as well as an overconnectivity between the auditory cortex and the Default Mode Network (DMN). The findings suggest that the auditory cortex is intrinsically more engaged toward internal processes and less available to external stimuli in amusics compared to controls. Beyond amusia, our findings provide new evidence for the link between cognitive deficits in pathology and abnormalities in the connectivity between sensory areas and the DMN at rest.
Congenital amusia is a lifelong deficit in music perception thought to reflect an underlying impairment in the perception and memory of pitch. The neural basis of amusic impairments is actively debated. Some prior studies have suggested that amusia stems from impaired connectivity between auditory and frontal cortex. However, it remains possible that impairments in pitch coding within auditory cortex also contribute to the disorder, in part because prior studies have not measured responses from the cortical regions most implicated in pitch perception in normal individuals. We addressed this question by measuring fMRI responses in 11 subjects with amusia and 11 ageand education-matched controls to a stimulus contrast that reliably identifies pitch-responsive regions in normal individuals: harmonic tones versus frequency-matched noise. Our findings demonstrate that amusic individuals with a substantial pitch perception deficit exhibit clusters of pitch-responsive voxels that are comparable in extent, selectivity, and anatomical location to those of control participants. Wediscuss possible explanations for why amusics might be impaired at perceiving pitch relations despite exhibiting normal fMRI responses to pitch in their auditory cortex: (1) individual neurons within the pitch-responsive region might exhibit abnormal tuning or temporal coding not detectable with fMRI, (2) anatomical tracts that link pitch-responsive regions to other brain areas (e.g., frontal cortex) might be altered, and (3) cortical regions outside of pitch-responsive cortex might be abnormal. The ability to identify pitch-responsive regions in individual amusic subjects will make it possible to ask more precise questions about their role in amusia in future work.
Recent theories suggest that the basis of neurodevelopmental auditory disorders such as dyslexia or specific language impairment might be a low-level sensory dysfunction. In the present study we test this hypothesis in congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in the processing of pitch-based material. We manipulated the temporal characteristics of auditory stimuli and investigated the influence of the time given to encode pitch information on participants’ performance in discrimination and short-term memory. Our results show that amusics’ performance in such tasks scales with the duration available to encode acoustic information. This suggests that in auditory neuro-developmental disorders, abnormalities in early steps of the auditory processing can underlie the high-level deficits (here musical disabilities). Observing that the slowing down of temporal dynamics improves amusics’ pitch abilities allows considering this approach as a potential tool for remediation in developmental auditory disorders.
Description Fit linear and generalized linear mixed-effects models. The models and their components are represented using S4 classes and methods. The core computational algorithms are implemented using the 'Eigen' C++ library for numerical linear algebra and 'RcppEigen' ``glue''.
The identity of a melody is independent of surface features such as key (pitch level), tempo (speed), and timbre (musical instrument). We examined the duration of memory for melodies (tunes) and whether such memory is affected by changes in key, tempo, or timbre. After listening to previously unfamiliar melodies twice, participants provided recognition ratings for the same (old) melodies as well as for an equal number of new melodies. The delay between initial exposure and test was 10 min, 1 day, or 1 week. In Experiment 1, half of the old melodies were transposed by six semitones or shifted in tempo by 64 beats per minute. In Experiment 2, half of the old melodies were changed in timbre (piano to saxophone, or vice versa). In both experiments, listeners remembered the melodies, and there was no forgetting over the course of a week. Changing the key or tempo from exposure to test had a detrimental impact on recognition after 10 min and 1 day, but not after 1 week. Changing the timbre affected recognition negatively after all three delays. Mental representations of unfamiliar melodies appear to be consolidated after only two presentations. These representations include surface information unrelated to a melody's identity, although information about key and tempo fades at a faster rate than information about timbre.
Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that primarily manifests as a difficulty in the perception and memory of pitch-based materials, including music. Recent findings have shown that the amusic brain exhibits altered functioning of a fronto-temporal network during pitch perception and short-term memory. Within this network, during the encoding of melodies, a decreased right backward frontal-to-temporal connectivity was reported in amusia, along with an abnormal connectivity within and between auditory cortices. The present study investigated whether connectivity patterns between these regions were affected during the short-term memory retrieval of melodies. Amusics and controls had to indicate whether sequences of six tones that were presented in pairs were the same or different. When melodies were different only one tone changed in the second melody. Brain responses to the changed tone in “Different” trials and to its equivalent (original) tone in “Same” trials were compared between groups using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM). DCM results confirmed that congenital amusia is characterized by an altered effective connectivity within and between the two auditory cortices during sound processing. Furthermore, right temporal-to-frontal message passing was altered in comparison to controls, with notably an increase in “Same” trials. An additional analysis in control participants emphasized that the detection of an unexpected event in the typically functioning brain is supported by right fronto-temporal connections. The results can be interpreted in a predictive coding framework as reflecting an abnormal prediction error sent by temporal auditory regions towards frontal areas in the amusic brain.
The question of what makes a good melody has interested composers, music theorists, and psychologists alike. Many of the observed principles of good "melodic continuation" involve melodic contour-the pattern of rising and falling pitch within a sequence. Previous work has shown that contour perception can extend beyond pitch to other auditory dimensions, such as brightness and loudness. Here, we show that the generalization of contour perception to nontraditional dimensions also extends to melodic expectations. In the first experiment, subjective ratings for 3-tone sequences that vary in brightness or loudness conformed to the same general contour-based expectations as pitch sequences. In the second experiment, we modified the sequence of melody presentation such that melodies with the same beginning were blocked together. This change produced substantively different results, but the patterns of ratings remained similar across the 3 auditory dimensions. Taken together, these results suggest that (a) certain well-known principles of melodic expectation (such as the expectation for a reversal following a skip) are dependent on long-term context, and (b) these expectations are not unique to the dimension of pitch and may instead reflect more general principles of perceptual organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
Variations in the spectral shape of harmonic tone complexes are perceived as timbre changes and can lead to poorer fundamental frequency (F0) or pitch discrimination. Less is known about the effects of F0 variations on spectral shape discrimination. The aims of the study were to determine whether the interactions between pitch and timbre are symmetric, and to test whether musical training affects listeners' ability to ignore variations in irrelevant perceptual dimensions. Difference limens (DLs) for F0 were measured with and without random, concurrent, variations in spectral centroid, and vice versa. Additionally, sensitivity was measured as the target parameter and the interfering parameter varied by the same amount, in terms of individual DLs. Results showed significant and similar interference between pitch (F0) and timbre (spectral centroid) dimensions, with upward spectral motion often confused for upward F0 motion, and vice versa. Musicians had better F0DLs than non-musicians on average, but similar spectral centroid DLs. Both groups showed similar interference effects, in terms of decreased sensitivity, in both dimensions. Results reveal symmetry in the interference effects between pitch and timbre, once differences in sensitivity between dimensions and subjects are controlled. Musical training does not reliably help to overcome these effects.
This paper identifies several serious problems with the widespread use of ANOVAs for the analysis of categorical outcome variables such as forced-choice variables, question-answer accuracy, choice in production (e.g. in syntactic priming research), et cetera. I show that even after applying the arcsine-square-root transformation to proportional data, ANOVA can yield spurious results. I discuss conceptual issues underlying these problems and alternatives provided by modern statistics. Specifically, I introduce ordinary logit models (i.e. logistic regression), which are well-suited to analyze categorical data and offer many advantages over ANOVA. Unfortunately, ordinary logit models do not include random effect modeling. To address this issue, I describe mixed logit models (Generalized Linear Mixed Models for binomially distributed outcomes, Breslow & Clayton, 1993), which combine the advantages of ordinary logit models with the ability to account for random subject and item effects in one step of analysis. Throughout the paper, I use a psycholinguistic data set to compare the different statistical methods.
Pitch is a defining perceptual property of many real-world sounds, including music and speech. Classically, theories of pitch perception have differentiated between temporal and spectral cues. These cues are rendered distinct by the frequency resolution of the ear, such that some frequencies produce "resolved" peaks of excitation in the cochlea, whereas others are "unresolved," providing a pitch cue only via their temporal fluctuations. Despite longstanding interest, the neural structures that process pitch, and their relationship to these cues, have remained controversial. Here, using fMRI in humans, we report the following: (1) consistent with previous reports, all subjects exhibited pitch-sensitive cortical regions that responded substantially more to harmonic tones than frequency-matched noise; (2) the response of these regions was mainly driven by spectrally resolved harmonics, although they also exhibited a weak but consistent response to unresolved harmonics relative to noise; (3) the response of pitch-sensitive regions to a parametric manipulation of resolvability tracked psychophysical discrimination thresholds for the same stimuli; and (4) pitch-sensitive regions were localized to specific tonotopic regions of anterior auditory cortex, extending from a low-frequency region of primary auditory cortex into a more anterior and less frequency-selective region of nonprimary auditory cortex. These results demonstrate that cortical pitch responses are located in a stereotyped region of anterior auditory cortex and are predominantly driven by resolved frequency components in a way that mirrors behavior.
In a widely cited study, Levitin (1994) suggested the existence of absolute pitch memory for music in the general population beyond the rare trait of genuine absolute pitch (AP). In his sample, a significant proportion of non-AP possessors were able to reproduce absolute pitch levels when asked to sing very familiar pop songs from memory. Forty-four percent of participants sang the correct pitch on at least one of two trials, and 12% were correct on both trials. However, until now, no replication of this study has ever been published. The current paper presents the results of a large replication endeavour across six different labs in Germany and the UK. All labs used the same methodology, carefully replicating Levitin’s original experiment. In each lab, between 40 and 50 participants were tested (N = 277). Participants were asked to sing two different pop songs of their choice. All sung productions were compared to the original songs. Twenty-five percent of the participants sang the exact pitch of at least one of the two chosen songs and 4% hit the right pitches for both songs. Our results generally confirm the findings of Levitin (1994). However, the results differ considerably across laboratories, and the estimated overall effect using meta-analysis techniques was significantly smaller than Levitin’s original result. This illustrates the variability of empirical findings derived from small sample sizes and corroborates the need for replication and meta-analytical studies in music psychology in general.
Norms for a musical corpus.
In this article, we present norms for a standardized set of 144 melodie excerpts. The melodies have been standardized on four variables corresponding to familiarity, verbal evocations, musical categories (vocal or instrumental) and age of acquisition. For this purpose, estimations were obtained in 120 French university students. The results show that musical excerpts can be submitted to psychometric measures similar to normative measures obtained for other stimuli. Except for the age of acquisition which was only determined for a limited number of excepts, the other variables such as familiarity, musical category as well as verbal responses associated to each musical except were identified. The present results extend data obtained in a previous investigation with the same set of melodies infrench speaking subjectsfrom Quebec by Peretz et her colleagues (1995). This study provides a standardized set of melodies available for research in the psychology of music.
Key words : norms, music, familiarity, verbal associations.
Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of music perception and production. The present study investigated the cerebral bases of impaired pitch perception and memory in congenital amusia using behavioural measures, magnetoencephalography and voxel-based morphometry. Congenital amusics and matched control subjects performed two melodic tasks (a melodic contour task and an easier transposition task); they had to indicate whether sequences of six tones (presented in pairs) were the same or different. Behavioural data indicated that in comparison with control participants, amusics' short-term memory was impaired for the melodic contour task, but not for the transposition task. The major finding was that pitch processing and short-term memory deficits can be traced down to amusics' early brain responses during encoding of the melodic information. Temporal and frontal generators of the N100m evoked by each note of the melody were abnormally recruited in the amusic brain. Dynamic causal modelling of the N100m further revealed decreased intrinsic connectivity in both auditory cortices, increased lateral connectivity between auditory cortices as well as a decreased right fronto-temporal backward connectivity in amusics relative to control subjects. Abnormal functioning of this fronto-temporal network was also shown during the retention interval and the retrieval of melodic information. In particular, induced gamma oscillations in right frontal areas were decreased in amusics during the retention interval. Using voxel-based morphometry, we confirmed morphological brain anomalies in terms of white and grey matter concentration in the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right superior temporal gyrus in the amusic brain. The convergence between functional and structural brain differences strengthens the hypothesis of abnormalities in the fronto-temporal pathway of the amusic brain. Our data provide first evidence of altered functioning of the auditory cortices during pitch perception and memory in congenital amusia. They further support the hypothesis that in neurodevelopmental disorders impacting high-level functions (here musical abilities), abnormalities in cerebral processing can be observed in early brain responses.
Some combinations of musical notes sound pleasing and are termed "consonant," but others sound unpleasant and are termed "dissonant." The distinction between consonance and dissonance plays a central role in Western music, and its origins have posed one of the oldest and most debated problems in perception. In modern times, dissonance has been widely believed to be the product of "beating": interference between frequency components in the cochlea that has been believed to be more pronounced in dissonant than consonant sounds. However, harmonic frequency relations, a higher-order sound attribute closely related to pitch perception, has also been proposed to account for consonance. To tease apart theories of musical consonance, we tested sound preferences in individuals with congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder characterized by abnormal pitch perception. We assessed amusics' preferences for musical chords as well as for the isolated acoustic properties of beating and harmonicity. In contrast to control subjects, amusic listeners showed no preference for consonance, rating the pleasantness of consonant chords no higher than that of dissonant chords. Amusics also failed to exhibit the normally observed preference for harmonic over inharmonic tones, nor could they discriminate such tones from each other. Despite these abnormalities, amusics exhibited normal preferences and discrimination for stimuli with and without beating. This dissociation indicates that, contrary to classic theories, beating is unlikely to underlie consonance. Our results instead suggest the need to integrate harmonicity as a foundation of music preferences, and illustrate how amusia may be used to investigate normal auditory function.
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.
Develops a 2-component model of how melodies are stored in long- and short-term memory. The 1st component is the overlearned perceptual-motor schema of the musical scale. Evidence is presented supporting the lifetime stability of scales and the fact that they seem to have a basically logarithmic form cross-culturally. The 2nd component, melodic contour, is shown to function independently of pitch interval sequence in memory. 21 college students were studied using a recognition memory paradigm in which tonal standard stimuli were confused with same-contour comparisons, whether they were exact transpositions or tonal answers, but not with atonal comparison stimuli. This result is contrasted with earlier work using atonal melodies and shows the interdependence of the 2 components, scale and contour. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Evidence for the absolute nature of long-term auditory memory is provided by analyzing the production of familiar melodies.
Additionally, a two-component theory of absolute pitch is presented, in which this rare ability is conceived as consisting
of a more common ability,pitch memory, and a separate, less common ability,pitch labeling. Forty-six subjects sang two different popular songs, and their productions were compared with the actual pitches used in
recordings of those songs. Forty percent of the subjects sang the correct pitch on at least one trial; 12% of the subjects
hit the correct pitch on both trials, and 44% came within two semitones of the correct pitch on both trials. The results show
a convergence with previous studies on the stability of auditory imagery and latent absolute pitch ability; the results further
suggest that individuals might possess representations of pitch that are more stable and accurate than previously recognized.
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects music processing and that is ascribed to a deficit in pitch processing. We investigated whether this deficit extended to pitch processing in speech, notably the pitch changes used to contrast lexical tones in tonal languages. Congenital amusics and matched controls, all non-tonal language speakers, were tested for lexical tone discrimination in Mandarin Chinese (Experiment 1) and in Thai (Experiment 2). Tones were presented in pairs and participants were required to make same/different judgments. Experiment 2 additionally included musical analogs of Thai tones for comparison. Performance of congenital amusics was inferior to that of controls for all materials, suggesting a domain-general pitch-processing deficit. The pitch deficit of amusia is thus not limited to music, but may compromise the ability to process and learn tonal languages. Combined with acoustic analyses of the tone material, the present findings provide new insights into the nature of the pitch-processing deficit exhibited by amusics.
Pitch intervals are central to most musical systems, which utilize pitch at the expense of other acoustic dimensions. It seemed plausible that pitch might uniquely permit precise perception of the interval separating two sounds, as this could help explain its importance in music. To explore this notion, a simple discrimination task was used to measure the precision of interval perception for the auditory dimensions of pitch, brightness, and loudness. Interval thresholds were then expressed in units of just-noticeable differences for each dimension, to enable comparison across dimensions. Contrary to expectation, when expressed in these common units, interval acuity was actually worse for pitch than for loudness or brightness. This likely indicates that the perceptual dimension of pitch is unusual not for interval perception per se, but rather for the basic frequency resolution it supports. The ubiquity of pitch in music may be due in part to this fine-grained basic resolution.
Congenital amusia is a disorder that affects the perception and production of music. While amusia has been associated with deficits in pitch discrimination, several reports suggest that memory deficits also play a role. The present study investigated short-term memory span for pitch-based and verbal information in 14 individuals with amusia and matched controls. Analogous adaptive-tracking procedures were used to generate tone and digit spans using stimuli that exceeded psychophysically measured pitch perception thresholds. Individuals with amusia had significantly smaller tone spans, whereas their digits spans were a similar size to those of controls. An automated operation span task was used to determine working memory capacity. Working memory deficits were seen in only a small subgroup of individuals with amusia. These findings support the existence of a pitch-specific component within short-term memory and suggest that congenital amusia is more than a disorder of fine-grained pitch discrimination.
As previously suggested, attention may increase segregation via enhancement and suppression sensory mechanisms. To test this hypothesis, we proposed an interleaved melody paradigm with two rhythm conditions applied to familiar target melodies and unfamiliar distractor melodies sharing pitch and timbre properties. When rhythms of both target and distractor were irregular, target melodies were identified above chance level. A sensory enhancement mechanism guided by listeners' knowledge may have helped to extract targets from the interleaved sequence. When the distractor was rhythmically regular, performance was increased, suggesting that the distractor may have been suppressed by a sensory suppression mechanism.
Congenital amusia (tone deafness) is a lifelong disorder that prevents typically developing individuals from acquiring basic musical skills. Electrophysiological evidence indicates that congenital amusia is related to a musical pitch deficit that does not seem to arise from a dysfunction of the auditory cortex but rather from an anomaly along a frontotemporal auditory pathway. In order to better localize the neural basis of this pitch disorder, here we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Congenital amusic adults and "musically intact" controls were scanned while passively listening to pure-tone melodic-like sequences in which the pitch distance between consecutive tones was varied parametrically. In both amusics and controls, brain activity increased as a function of increasing pitch distance, even for fine pitch changes, in both the left and right auditory cortices. These results support prior electrophysiological work showing that the auditory cortex of amusic individuals responds normally to pitch. In contrast, the right inferior frontal gyrus showed an abnormal deactivation in the amusic group, as well as reduced connectivity with the auditory cortex as compared with controls. These fMRI data are highly consistent with previous gray and white matter anomalies found in amusics in the auditory and inferior frontal cortices, as well as reduced white matter connections between these 2 regions.
This study investigated whether congenital amusia, a neuro-developmental disorder of musical perception, also has implications for speech intonation processing. In total, 16 British amusics and 16 matched controls completed five intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on discrimination, identification and imitation of statements and questions that were characterized primarily by pitch direction differences in the final word. This intonation-processing deficit in amusia was largely associated with a psychophysical pitch direction discrimination deficit. These findings suggest that amusia impacts upon one's language abilities in subtle ways, and support previous evidence that pitch processing in language and music involves shared mechanisms.
Congenital amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics' emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.
Auditory perception is our main gateway to communication with others via speech and music, and it also plays an important role in alerting and orienting us to new events. This review provides an overview of selected topics pertaining to the perception and neural coding of sound, starting with the first stage of filtering in the cochlea and its profound impact on perception. The next topic, pitch, has been debated for millennia, but recent technical and theoretical developments continue to provide us with new insights. Cochlear filtering and pitch both play key roles in our ability to parse the auditory scene, enabling us to attend to one auditory object or stream while ignoring others. An improved understanding of the basic mechanisms of auditory perception will aid us in the quest to tackle the increasingly important problem of hearing loss in our aging population. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 69 is January 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Congenital amusia is a music perception disorder believed to reflect a deficit in fine-grained pitch perception and/or short-term or working memory for pitch. Because most measures of pitch perception include memory and segmentation components, it has been difficult to determine the true extent of pitch processing deficits in amusia. It is also unclear whether pitch deficits persist at frequencies beyond the range of musical pitch. To address these questions, experiments were conducted with amusics and matched controls, manipulating both the stimuli and the task demands. First, we assessed pitch discrimination at low (500 Hz and 2000 Hz) and high (8000 Hz) frequencies using a three-interval forced-choice task. Amusics exhibited deficits even at the highest frequency, which lies beyond the existence region of musical pitch. Next, we assessed the extent to which frequency coding deficits persist in one- and two-interval frequency-modulation (FM) and amplitude-modulation (AM) detection tasks at 500 Hz at slow (fm = 4 Hz) and fast (fm = 20 Hz) modulation rates. Amusics still exhibited deficits in one-interval FM detection tasks that should not involve memory or segmentation. Surprisingly, amusics were also impaired on AM detection, which should not involve pitch processing. Finally, direct comparisons between the detection of continuous and discrete FM demonstrated that amusics suffer deficits both in coding and segmenting pitch information. Our results reveal auditory deficits in amusia extending beyond pitch perception that are subtle when controlling for memory and segmentation, and are likely exacerbated in more complex contexts such as musical listening.
The past decade of research has provided compelling evidence that musical engagement is a fundamental human trait, and its biological basis is increasingly scrutinized. In this endeavor, the detailed study of individuals who have musical deficiencies is instructive because of likely neurogenetic underpinnings. Such individuals have ‘congenital amusia’, an umbrella term for lifelong musical disabilities that cannot be attributed to intellectual disability, lack of exposure, or brain damage after birth. Key points are reviewed here that have emerged during recent years regarding the neurobiology of the disorder, focusing on the importance of recurrent processing between the right inferior frontal cortex and the auditory cortex for conscious monitoring of musical pitch, and how this relates to developmental cognitive disorders in general.
Tools for performing model selection and model averaging. Automated model selection through subsetting the maximum model, with optional constraints for model inclusion. Model parameter and prediction averaging based on model weights derived from information criteria (AICc and alike) or custom model weighting schemes.
[Please do not request the full text - it is an R package. The up-to-date manual is available from CRAN].
In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, the author challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. Since Plato's time, the relationship between music and language has attracted interest and debate from a wide range of thinkers. Recently, scientific research on this topic has been growing rapidly, as scholars from diverse disciplines including linguistics, cognitive science, music cognition, and neuroscience are drawn to the music-language interface as one way to explore the extent to which different mental abilities are processed by separate brain mechanisms. Accordingly, the relevant data and theories have been spread across a range of disciplines. This book provides the first synthesis, arguing that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.
The condition of congenital amusia, commonly known as tone-deafness, has been described for more than a century, but has received little empirical attention. In the present study, a research effort has been made to document in detail the behavioural manifestations of congenital amusia. A group of 11 adults, fitting stringent criteria of musical disabilities, were examined in a series of tests originally designed to assess the presence and specificity of musical disorders in brain-damaged patients. The results show that congenital amusia is related to severe deficiencies in processing pitch variations. The deficit extends to impairments in music memory and recognition as well as in singing and the ability to tap in time to music. Interestingly, the disorder appears specific to the musical domain. Congenital amusical individuals process and recognize speech, including speech prosody, common environmental sounds and human voices, as well as control subjects. Thus, the present study convincingly demonstrates the existence of congenital amusia as a new class of learning disabilities that affect musical abilities.
We studied the changes in pitch, induced by the sound pressure level (SPL). For some problems concerning these changes no answer was found in the literature and for some others conflicting answers were found.In our experiment we varied the SPL of the test stimulus as well as of the comparison stimulus. Both stimuli were single frequency stimuli. The data will be analysed as to reveal the significance of the pitch for each observer and for the average, the influence of the comparison level and the shape of the curves. The effect of some stimulation conditions is discussed. An adapted rule for the description of the pitch changes is proposed as the rule by Stevens was found inaccurate. The results by other investigators are discussed and some divergent results are reconciled. The standard deviations in the adjustments are discussed with respect to the literature on the just noticeable differences (jnd) for pitch. The effect of the experimental method on the values of the jnd are shown.
Intensity and duration are important parameters for the processing of speech and music. Neuroimaging results on the processing of these parameters in tasks involving the discrimination of stimuli based on these parameters are controversial. Depending on the experimental approach, varying hypotheses on the involvement of the left and right auditory cortex (AC) have been put forward. The aim of the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to find differences and commonalities in location and strength of brain activity during the processing of intensity and duration when the same stimuli have to be actively categorized according to these two parameters. For this we used a recently introduced method to determine lateralized processing in the AC with contralateral noise. Harmonic frequency modulated (FM) tone complexes were presented monaurally without and with contralateral noise. During categorization of the tones according to their intensity, contralateral noise increased activity mainly in the left AC, suggesting a special role for the left AC in this task. During categorization of tones according to their duration, contralateral noise increased activity in both the left and the right AC. This suggests that active categorization of FM tones according to their duration does not involve only the left AC as has been suggested, but also the right AC to a substantial degree. The area around Heschl's sulcus seems to be most strongly involved during both intensity and duration categorization, albeit with different lateralization. Altogether the results of the present study support the view that the lateralized processing of the same stimuli in the human AC is strongly modulated by the given task (top-down effect).
The use of both linear and generalized linear mixed‐effects models ( LMM s and GLMM s) has become popular not only in social and medical sciences, but also in biological sciences, especially in the field of ecology and evolution. Information criteria, such as Akaike Information Criterion ( AIC ), are usually presented as model comparison tools for mixed‐effects models.
The presentation of ‘variance explained’ ( R ² ) as a relevant summarizing statistic of mixed‐effects models, however, is rare, even though R ² is routinely reported for linear models ( LM s) and also generalized linear models ( GLM s). R ² has the extremely useful property of providing an absolute value for the goodness‐of‐fit of a model, which cannot be given by the information criteria. As a summary statistic that describes the amount of variance explained, R ² can also be a quantity of biological interest.
One reason for the under‐appreciation of R ² for mixed‐effects models lies in the fact that R ² can be defined in a number of ways. Furthermore, most definitions of R ² for mixed‐effects have theoretical problems (e.g. decreased or negative R ² values in larger models) and/or their use is hindered by practical difficulties (e.g. implementation).
Here, we make a case for the importance of reporting R ² for mixed‐effects models. We first provide the common definitions of R ² for LM s and GLM s and discuss the key problems associated with calculating R ² for mixed‐effects models. We then recommend a general and simple method for calculating two types of R ² (marginal and conditional R ² ) for both LMM s and GLMM s, which are less susceptible to common problems.
This method is illustrated by examples and can be widely employed by researchers in any fields of research, regardless of software packages used for fitting mixed‐effects models. The proposed method has the potential to facilitate the presentation of R ² for a wide range of circumstances.
The degree to which cognitive resources are shared in the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones remains uncertain. Testing Mandarin amusics on their categorical perception of Mandarin lexical tones may provide insight into this issue. In the present study, a group of 15 amusic Mandarin speakers identified and discriminated Mandarin tones presented as continua in separate blocks. The tonal continua employed were from a high-level tone to a mid-rising tone and from a high-level tone to a high-falling tone. The two tonal continua were made in the contexts of natural speech and of nonlinguistic analogues. In contrast to the controls, the participants with amusia showed no improvement for discrimination pairs that crossed the classification boundary for either speech or nonlinguistic analogues, indicating a lack of categorical perception. The lack of categorical perception of Mandarin tones in the amusic group shows that the pitch deficits in amusics may be domain-general, and this suggests that the processing of musical pitch and lexical tones may share certain cognitive resources and/or processes (Patel 2003, 2008, 2012).
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized primarily by difficulties in the pitch domain. The aim of the present study was to investigate the perception of musical timbre in a group of individuals with congenital amusia by probing discrimination and short-term memory for real-world timbral stimuli as well as examining the ability of these individuals to sort instrumental tones according to their timbral similarity. Thirteen amusic individuals were matched with thirteen non-amusic controls on a range of background variables. The discrimination task included stimuli of two different durations and pairings of instrumental tones that reflected varying distances in a perceptual timbre space. Performance in the discrimination task was at ceiling for both groups. In contrast, amusic individuals scored lower than controls on the short-term timbral memory task. Amusic individuals also performed worse than controls on the sorting task, suggesting differences in the higher-order representation of musical timbre. These findings add to the emerging picture of amusia as a disorder that has consequences for the perception and memory of musical timbre, as well as pitch.
The ability to make sense of the music in our environment involves sophisticated cognitive mechanisms that, for most people, are acquired effortlessly and in early life. A special population of individuals, with a disorder termed congenital amusia, report lifelong difficulties in this regard. Exploring the nature of this developmental disorder provides a window onto the cognitive architecture of typical musical processing, as well as allowing a study of the relationship between processing of music and other domains, such as language. The present article considers findings concerning pitch discrimination, pitch memory, contour processing, experiential aspects of music listening in amusia, and emerging evidence concerning the neurobiology of the disorder. A simplified model of melodic processing is outlined, and possible loci of the cognitive deficit are discussed.