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🪵 The Threshold

Learning a tune across many pitch levels enables invariant recognition, like visual object learning

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tagsja-picks, definitional_content, singleton, xref, category/definitional-content

3 min read

Learning a tune across many pitch levels enables invariant recognition, like visual object learning

Evidence

Most people easily recognise well known melodies even when they are transposed to a different key. The invariant property of transposed melodies is the preserved pitch ratio relationship between notes of the melody; i.e. pitch intervals of the melody remain the same despite changes in absolute pitch. For this reason, it is assumed that the ability to recognise pitch relationships (relative pitch perception) is rather robust and commonly found in the population. Recognition of preserved pitch interval patterns irrespective of absolute pitch is an auditory example of translation-invariant object perception (Kubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001 ; Griffiths and Warren 2004 ; Winkler et al. 2009 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5265 (#expands, via linked claim)

In support of the assumed generality of relative pitch perception, it has been shown that violations of transposed pitch patterns elicit discriminative brain responses in neonates (Stefanics et al. 2009 ) and young infants (Tew et al. 2009 ). So it is surprising that relative pitch perception can be rather poor (e.g. see (Foster and Zatorre 2010 ; McDermott et al. 2010 )), especially if contour violations and tonal melodies are excluded (Dowling 1986 ). … McDermott et al. ( 2010 ), commenting on the poor pitch interval discrimination threshold they found, suggested that the importance of pitch as an expressive musical feature may rest more on an ability to detect pitch differences between tones, rather than an ability to recognise complex patterns of pitch intervals. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5263 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Tune recognition emerges from learning the same melody across many pitch levels; Learning a tune resembles learning translation-invariant visual object recognition; Relative pitch recognition is an auditory case of translation-invariant object perception — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5265 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

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