Pitch perception rests on universal psychoacoustic mechanisms across all cultures

Evidence

Music of all cultures is based on the use of instruments (including the human voice) which produce notes of different pitches. The particular set of pitches used by any culture may be unique but the psychoacoustic basis on which pitch is perceived is basic to all human listeners. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 771

Music of all cultures is based on the use of instruments (including the human voice) that produce notes of different pitches. The particular set of pitches used by any culture may be unique, but the psychoacoustic basis on which pitch is perceived is basic to all human listeners. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 771

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes that pitch perception has a universal psychoacoustic foundation beneath culturally variable pitch sets.
• QUESTION: What exactly is universal about the psychoacoustic basis of pitch across cultures — is it the critical bands, the octave equivalence, or the harmonic series processing?
• corroborated: 5 independent passages support this claim — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 771; David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 771
• XREF: connects to: Emotion in speech is conveyed through pitch, intensity, and tempo; Emotional prosody cues are shared across closely related languages — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 1363; Aesthetic sound-quality reactions depend strongly on sociocultural background (+1 more)