Crossmodal Visuospatial Effects on Auditory Perception of Musical Contour

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Simon Lacey ◽  
James Nguyen ◽  
Peter Schneider ◽  
K. Sathian
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Pitch Contour ◽  
Auditory Task ◽  
Final Note ◽  
First Response ◽  
Crossmodal Correspondence ◽  
Auditory Experience

Abstract The crossmodal correspondence between auditory pitch and visuospatial elevation (in which high- and low-pitched tones are associated with high and low spatial elevation respectively) has been proposed as the basis for Western musical notation. One implication of this is that music perception engages visuospatial processes and may not be exclusively auditory. Here, we investigated how music perception is influenced by concurrent visual stimuli. Participants listened to unfamiliar five-note musical phrases with four kinds of pitch contour (rising, falling, rising–falling, or falling–rising), accompanied by incidental visual contours that were either congruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual rising) or incongruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual falling) and judged whether the final note of the musical phrase was higher or lower in pitch than the first. Response times for the auditory judgment were significantly slower for incongruent compared to congruent trials, i.e., there was a congruency effect, even though the visual contours were incidental to the auditory task. These results suggest that music perception, although generally regarded as an auditory experience, may actually be multisensory in nature.

scholarly journals Vowel Content Influences Relative Pitch Perception in Vocal Melodies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Russo ◽  
Dominique T Vuvan ◽  
William Forde Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Response Times ◽  
Pitch Perception ◽  
Pitch Contour ◽  
Relative Pitch ◽  
Interval Size ◽  
Final Note

Note-to-note changes in brightness are able to influence the perception of interval size. Changes that are congruent with pitch tend to expand interval size, whereas changes that are incongruent tend to contract. In the case of singing, brightness of notes can vary as a function of vowel content. In the present study, we investigated whether note-to-note changes in brightness arising from vowel content influence perception of relative pitch. In Experiment 1, three-note sequences were synthesized so that they varied with regard to the brightness of vowels from note to note. As expected, brightness influenced judgments of interval size. Changes in brightness that were congruent with changes in pitch led to an expansion of perceived interval size. A follow-up experiment confirmed that the results of Experiment 1 were not due to pitch distortions. In Experiment 2, the final note of three-note sequences was removed, and participants were asked to make speeded judgments of the pitch contour. An analysis of response times revealed that brightness of vowels influenced contour judgments. Changes in brightness that were congruent with changes in pitch led to faster response times than did incongruent changes. These findings show that the brightness of vowels yields an extra-pitch influence on the perception of relative pitch in song.

scholarly journals Vowel Content Influences Relative Pitch Perception in Vocal Melodies

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank A. Russo ◽  
Dominique T. Vuvan ◽  
William Forde Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Response Times ◽  
Pitch Perception ◽  
Pitch Contour ◽  
Relative Pitch ◽  
Interval Size ◽  
Final Note

Note-to-note changes in brightness are able to influence the perception of interval size. Changes that are congruent with pitch tend to expand interval size, whereas changes that are incongruent tend to contract. In the case of singing, brightness of notes can vary as a function of vowel content. In the present study, we investigated whether note-to-note changes in brightness arising from vowel content influence perception of relative pitch. In Experiment 1, three-note sequences were synthesized so that they varied with regard to the brightness of vowels from note to note. As expected, brightness influenced judgments of interval size. Changes in brightness that were congruent with changes in pitch led to an expansion of perceived interval size. A follow-up experiment confirmed that the results of Experiment 1 were not due to pitch distortions. In Experiment 2, the final note of three-note sequences was removed, and participants were asked to make speeded judgments of the pitch contour. An analysis of response times revealed that brightness of vowels influenced contour judgments. Changes in brightness that were congruent with changes in pitch led to faster response times than did incongruent changes. These findings show that the brightness of vowels yields an extra-pitch influence on the perception of relative pitch in song.

What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency? The dual-task analogy

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIFFANY C. SANDOVAL ◽  
TAMAR H. GOLLAN ◽  
VICTOR S. FERREIRA ◽  
DAVID P. SALMON
Keyword(s):  
Dual Task ◽  
Verbal Fluency ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Language Fluency ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Task Effects ◽  
First Response ◽  
Intrusion Errors ◽  
Cross Language

We investigated the consequences of bilingualism for verbal fluency by comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, and dominant versus non-dominant-language fluency. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced fewer correct responses, slower first response times and proportionally delayed retrieval, relative to monolinguals. In Experiment 2, similar results were obtained comparing the dominant to the non-dominant languages within bilinguals. Additionally, bilinguals produced significantly lower-frequency words and a greater proportion of cognate responses than monolinguals, and bilinguals produced more cross-language intrusion errors when speaking the non-dominant language, but almost no such intrusions when speaking the dominant language. These results support an analogy between bilingualism and dual-task effects (Rohrer et al., 1995), implying a role for between-language interference in explaining the bilingual fluency disadvantage, and suggest that bilingual fluency will be maximized under testing conditions that minimize such interference. More generally, the findings suggest a role for selection by competition in language production, and that such competition is more influential in relatively unconstrained production tasks.

Word frequency does not moderate the degree to which people can selectively attend to parts of visually presented words

2020 ◽  
pp. 174702182096906
Author(s):  
Todd A Kahan ◽  
Louisa M Slowiaczek ◽  
Ned Scott ◽  
Brian T Pfohl
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
High Frequency ◽  
Congruency Effect ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Test Word ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Bigram Frequency ◽  
Capacity Model ◽  
Entire Word ◽  
High Frequency Words

Whether attention is allocated to an entire word or can be confined to part of a word was examined in an experiment using a visual composite task. Participants saw a study word, a cue to attend to either the right or left half, and a test word, and indicated if the cued half of the words (e.g., left) was the same (e.g., TOLD-TONE) or different (e.g., TOLD-WINE). Prior research using this task reports a larger congruency effect for low-frequency words relative to high-frequency words but extraneous variables were not equated. In this study ( N = 33), lexical (orthographic neighbourhood density) and sublexical (bigram frequency) variables were controlled, and word frequency was manipulated. Results indicate that word frequency does not moderate the degree to which parts of a word can be selectively attended/ignored. Response times to high-frequency words were faster than response times to low-frequency words but the congruency effect was equivalent. The data support a capacity model where attention is equally distributed across low-frequency and high-frequency words but low-frequency words require additional processing resources.

scholarly journals Performance on verbal fluency tasks depends on the given category/letter: Preliminary data from a multivariable analysis

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petar Gabrić ◽  
Mija Vandek
Keyword(s):  
Verbal Fluency ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Small Sample Size ◽  
Multivariable Analysis ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Response Latencies ◽  
Specific Effects ◽  
First Response ◽  
The Given

Verbal fluency tasks are often used in neuropsychological research and may have predictive and diagnostic utility in psychiatry and neurology. However, researchers using verbal fluency have uncritically assumed that there are no category- or phoneme-specific effects on verbal fluency performance. We recruited 16 young adult subjects and administered two semantic (animals, trees) and phonemic (K, M) fluency tasks. Because of the small sample size, results should be regarded as preliminary. On the animal compared to the tree task, subjects produced significantly more legal words, had a significantly lower intrusion rate, significantly shorter first-response latencies and final silence periods, as well as significantly shorter between-cluster response latencies. These differences may be explained by differences in the category sizes, integrity of the categories' borders, and efficiency of the functional connectivity between subcategories. On the K compared to the M task, subjects produced significantly more legal words and had significantly shorter between-cluster response times. Counterintuitively, a corpus analysis revealed there are more words starting with m compared to k in the experimental language. Our results have important implications for research utilizing verbal fluency, including decreased reproducibility, unreliability of diagnostic and predictive tools based on verbal fluency, and decreased knowledge accumulation.

Experiences of Time and Timelessness in Electroacoustic Music

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-247
Author(s):  
Jason Noble ◽  
Tanor Bonin ◽  
Stephen McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
General Trend ◽  
Electroacoustic Music ◽  
Human Information Processing ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
The One ◽  
Musical Context ◽  
Historical Antecedents

Electroacoustic music and its historical antecedents open up new ways of thinking about musical time. Whereas music performed by humans is necessarily constrained by certain temporal limits that define human information processing and embodiment, machines are capable of producing sound with scales and structures of time that reach potentially very far outside of these human limitations. But even musics produced with superhuman means are still subject to human constraints in music perception and cognition. Focusing on five principles of auditory perception – segmentation, grouping, pulse, metre and repetition – we hypothesise that musics that exceed or subvert the thresholds that define ‘human time’ are likely to be recognised by listeners as expressing timelessness. To support this hypothesis, we report an experiment in which a listening panel reviewed excerpts of electroacoustic music selected for their temporally subversive or excessive properties, and rated them (1) for the pace of time they express (normative, speeding up, or slowing down), and (2) for whether or not the music expresses ‘timelessness’. We find that while the specific musical parameters associated with temporal phenomenology vary from one musical context to the next, a general trend obtains across musical contexts through the excess or subversion of a particular perceptual constraint by a given musical parameter on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of time and timelessness on the other.

scholarly journals Re-Sounding Alarms: Designing Ergonomic Auditory Interfaces by Embracing Musical Insights

Healthcare ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 389
Author(s):  
Liam Foley ◽  
Cameron J. Anderson ◽  
Michael Schutz
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Temporal Complexity ◽  
Computer Interfaces ◽  
Human Computer Interfaces ◽  
Engineering Constraints ◽  
Insight Into

Auditory alarms are an important component of human–computer interfaces, used in mission-critical industries such as aviation, nuclear power plants, and hospital settings. Unfortunately, problems with recognition, detection, and annoyance continue to hamper their effectiveness. Historically, they appear designed more in response to engineering constraints than principles of hearing science. Here we argue that auditory perception in general and music perception in particular hold valuable lessons for alarm designers. We also discuss ongoing research suggesting that the temporal complexity of musical tones offers promising insight into new ways of addressing widely recognized shortcomings of current alarms.

scholarly journals Community first response and out-of-hospital cardiac arrest: a qualitative study of the views and experiences of international experts

BMJ Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. e042307
Author(s):  
Eithne Heffernan ◽  
Jenny Mc Sharry ◽  
Andrew Murphy ◽  
Tomás Barry ◽  
Conor Deasy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cardiac Arrest ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Future Research ◽  
First Response ◽  
Beneficial Impact ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
International Experts ◽  
The Impact

ObjectivesThis research aimed to examine the perspectives, experiences and practices of international experts in community first response: an intervention that entails the mobilisation of volunteers by the emergency medical services to respond to prehospital medical emergencies, particularly cardiac arrests, in their locality.DesignThis was a qualitative study in which semistructured interviews were conducted via teleconferencing. The data were analysed in accordance with an established thematic analysis procedure.SettingThere were participants from 11 countries: UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.ParticipantsSixteen individuals who held academic, clinical or managerial roles in the field of community first response were recruited. Maximum variation sampling targeted individuals who varied in terms of gender, occupation and country of employment. There were eight men and eight women. They included ambulance service chief executives, community first response programme managers and cardiac arrest registry managers.ResultsThe findings provided insights on motivating and supporting community first response volunteers, as well as the impact of this intervention. First, volunteers can be motivated by ‘bottom-up factors’, particularly their characteristics or past experiences, as well as ‘top-down factors’, including culture and legislation. Second, providing ongoing support, especially feedback and psychological services, is considered important for maintaining volunteer well-being and engagement. Third, community first response can have a beneficial impact that extends not only to patients but also to their family, their community and to the volunteers themselves.ConclusionsThe findings can inform the future development of community first response programmes, especially in terms of volunteer recruitment, training and support. The results also have implications for future research by highlighting that this intervention has important outcomes, beyond response times and patient survival, which should be measured, including the benefits for families, communities and volunteers.

Multiple Components of the Perception of Musical Sequences: A Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis and Some Implications for Auditory Imagery

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Berenice Carroll-Phelan ◽  
Peter J. Hampson
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Minimal Model ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Music Perception ◽  
Present Theory ◽  
Auditory Imagery ◽  
Auditory Information ◽  
Plausible Model ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Selective Intake

A neurologically plausible model of the auditory perception of musical sequences is proposed, and some implications are derived for auditory imagery. In line with a cognitive neuroscience approach, a componential analysis of the major functions required of auditory perception and imagery for musical sequences is first carried out, and a minimal model of auditory imagery and perception is outlined. The minimal model makes a clear distinction between the processing subsystems required for analyzing pitch and rhythm. It also incorporates an auditory buffer for the brief retention of relatively unprocessed auditory input, an attention subsystem that permits selective intake of relevant auditory information, a memory subsystem for melodic strings that combines the outputs of pitch and rhythmic analyses into a long-term, flexible representation of the musical sequence, and an associative memory system that links the results of perceptual analyses of music with extraperceptual (semantic and episodic) information about the musical string. The present theory builds on a recent model of music perception proposed by Peretz (1993) and also accounts for data from studies of patients with disorders of rhythmic processing, thus indicating the close relationship between auditory perception and imagery for rhythmic sequences, timing, and motor processes. Recent data are used to refine and extend the minimal model and provide an organizing framework for current laboratory work.

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