Substituting facial movements in singers changes the sounds of musical intervals

Cross-modal integration is ubiquitous within perception and, in humans, the McGurk effect demonstrates that seeing a person articulating speech can change what we hear into a new auditory percept. It remains unclear whether cross-modal integration of sight and sound generalizes to other visible vocal articulations like those made by singers. We surmise that perceptual integrative effects should involve music deeply, since there is ample indeterminacy and variability in its auditory signals. We show that switching videos of sung musical intervals changes systematically the estimated distance between two notes of a musical interval so that pairing the video of a smaller sung interval to a relatively larger auditory led to compression effects on rated intervals, whereas the reverse led to a stretching effect. In addition, after seeing a visually switched video of an equally-tempered sung interval and then hearing the same interval played on the piano, the two intervals were judged often different though they differed only in instrument. These findings reveal spontaneous, cross-modal, integration of vocal sounds and clearly indicate that strong integration of sound and sight can occur beyond the articulations of natural speech.

Learning melodic musical intervals: To block or to interleave?

Musical interval identification is a valuable skill for holistic and sophisticated musicianship. Yet, discriminating and identifying intervals is often challenging, especially for musical novices. Drawing on cognitive psychological principles, we built two experiments that investigated the utility of interleaving in enhancing novices’ aural identification of melodic ascending intervals. Specifically, we designed a novel programmed intervention during which novices learnt six interval types in an interleaved schedule (different interval types learnt interspersed) and six interval types in a blocked schedule (each interval type drilled several times before proceeding to the next) within a single session. When implemented in combination with familiar reference songs and singing as supplementary learning aids, interleaving and blocking yielded comparable performance on a test requiring participants to classify novel instances of the studied interval types (Experiment 1). However, in the absence of reference songs and singing, a robust interleaving effect emerged—interleaving produced superior musical interval identification than blocking (Experiment 2). Yet, most participants were unaware of the benefits of interleaving, and misjudged blocking to be more effective. These findings highlight the potential influence of context under which interleaving is a beneficial technique for learning melodic musical intervals.

Identification of Harmonic Musical Intervals: The Effect of Pitch Register and Tone Duration

An experiment was conducted to explore the effect of the pitch strength of pure tones constituting a dyad on the accuracy of musical interval identification. Pitch strength was controlled by presenting the intervals in different frequency regions and varying their duration. The intervals were organized into 18 blocks made up by a combination of three octaves: the second (65.4-130.8 Hz), the fourth (261.6- 523.3 Hz), and the sixth octave (1047-2093 Hz), and six tone durations, ranging 50-2000 ms in the second octave, and 10-500 ms in the two higher ones. The results indicate that interval identification improves with increasing pitch strength of the interval’s component tones. The identification scores were much lower in the second octave than in the two higher ones and in all octaves identification worsened as the interval’s duration was shortened. The intervals were most often confused with intervals of similar size rather than with their inversions and intervals of similar sonic character. This finding suggests that the main cue for the identification of harmonic intervals is the pitch distance between two tones. However, in the low pitch range, when the tone pitches are less salient, the impression of consonance may become a helpful, although not very effective cue.

A Comparison of Stimulus Variability in Lexical Tone and Melody Perception

Music and language share perceptual resources, and both map sound to invariant categories—invariant over and within speakers for language and over instruments and keys for music. The effects of stimulus variability on lexical tone and musical interval tasks among non-tone language speakers were compared using a matching (XAB) task under varying levels of stimulus variability. Listeners perceived Mandarin words better with single rather than multiple speakers and showed similar advantages in melodic interval perception for low (single instrument) versus high (multiple instruments) variability sets. Lexical tone and musical interval perception were affected similarly by increasing stimulus variability, on average. However, the magnitude of variability effects within subjects was not well correlated between the tasks, providing no evidence for shared category-mapping mechanism for the two domains. Instead, it suggests that crossover between tone and melody processing is driven by shared encoding of acoustic-phonetic features, and that differences in performance and learning by tone language speakers and musicians in the other domain represent progress along a phonetic–phonological–lexical continuum.

Absolute Judgment of Musical Interval Width

When a musical tone is sounded, most listeners are unable to identify its pitch by name. Those listeners who can identify pitches are said to have absolute pitch perception (AP). A limited subset of musicians possesses AP, and it has been debated whether musicians’ AP interferes with their ability to perceive tonal relationships between pitches, or relative pitch (RP). The present study tested musicians’ discrimination of relative pitch categories, or intervals, by placing absolute pitch values in conflict with relative pitch categories. AP listeners perceived intervals categorically, and their judgments were not affected by absolute pitch values. These results indicate that AP listeners do not infer interval identities from the absolute values between tones, and that RP categories are salient musical concepts in both RP and AP musicianship.

On the Conception and Measure of Consonance

What makes a musical interval consonant? Since the early Greeks, there have been two contrasting views: an “objective” approach, focusing on the mathematical relationship of frequencies, and a “subjective” approach, emphasizing auditory perception. These approaches are reviewed, as are several proposed measures of consonance. The author then presents a composition that uses intervals that are rated highly by the measures of consonance but are outside the scales of Western music and so are subjectively unfamiliar. The goal is to see whether, via repetition and other devices for overcoming unfamiliarity, the consonance of these intervals can be conveyed.