Neural detection of transposed melodies coexists with surprisingly poor explicit interval recognition

Evidence

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

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting tension: infants show neural discrimination of transposed patterns yet adult explicit interval detection is poor — worth chasing the developmental or task-level explanation.