Absolute pitch and pupillary response: Effects of timbre and key color

Schlemmer, Kathrin; Kulke, Franziska; Kuchinke, Lars; Meer, Elke van der

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.2005.00306.x

Cited by 25 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Following each trial the presentation of a smiley indicated a self paced period were subjects were allowed to blink, a procedure which is known to minimize blinking artifacts during the experimental trial (Schlemmer et al, 2005). The new trial started with the next fixation cross.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pupillary responses during lexical decisions vary with word frequency but not emotional valence

Kuchinke

Võ

Hofmann

et al. 2007

International Journal of Psychophysiology

178

169

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pupillary responses during lexical decisions vary with word frequency but not emotional valence

Kuchinke

Võ

Hofmann

et al. 2007

International Journal of Psychophysiology

178

169

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“…Schlemmer, Kulke, Kuchinke, & Van der Meer, 2005). The task was to name the pitches of the sine waves.…”

Section: Material: Memory and Attention Testsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Wöllner

Halpern

2015

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Individuals with high working memory (WM) capacity also tend to have better selective and divided attention. Although both capacities are essential for skilled performance in many areas, evidence for potential training and expertise effects is scarce. We investigated the attentional flexibility of musical conductors by comparing them to equivalently trained pianists. Conductors must focus their attention both on individual instruments and on larger sections of different instruments. We studied students and professionals in both domains to assess the contributions of age and training to these skills. Participants completed WM span tests for auditory and visual (notated) pitches and timing durations, as well as long-term memory tests. In three dichotic attention tasks, they were asked to detect small pitch and timing deviations from two melodic streams presented in baseline (separate streams), selective-attention (concentrating on only one stream), and divided-attention (concentrating on targets in both streams simultaneously) conditions. Conductors were better than pianists in detecting timing deviations in divided attention, and experts detected more targets than students. We found no group differences for WM capacity or for pitch deviations in the attention tasks, even after controlling for the older age of the experts. Musicians' WM spans across multimodal conditions were positively related to selective and divided attention. High-WM participants also had shorter reaction times in selective attention. Taken together, conductors showed higher attentional flexibility in successfully switching between different foci of attention.Keywords Selective and divided attention . Working memory . Long-term memory . Multimodal . Expertise . Cognitive aging Auditory processing, by its nature, requires considerable investment of executive resources. Auditory information is evanescent and can vary rapidly over short time intervals. Thus, both attending to the signal and buffering of information in the auditory stream are vital to comprehending everything from speech to birdsong to music. In this investigation, we examined the attentional and working memory (WM) capacities, and the relation between them, in a profession that should demand the highest level of auditory executive capacity: musical conductors.Several kinds of attention are essential to parse the auditory world. Considering first selective attention, Fritz, Elhilali, David, and Shamma (2007) observed that in everyday situations we constantly must extract features such as harmonicity, intensity, duration, and rhythm in order to group, identify, and locate auditory objects, even above and beyond the challenge of following one conversation among many, as in the "cocktail party problem" (Cherry, 1953). In other words, we need proficiency at auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990;Fritz et al., 2007). We normally accomplish this analysis quite well with both top-down and bottom-up control processes-by, for instance, increasing activity in relevant and decreasin...

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“…In this sense, it is possible that prior note knowledge might have had a more substantial effect on tone estimates if a more familiar timbre (e.g., piano) note series was used. Previous research indicates that AP possessors are more accurate and faster to identify notes when they are familiar with the timbre (Bahr et al, 2005; Schlemmer et al, 2005). Further Schlemmer (2009) has shown a positive correlation between experience with a particular piece and the ability to spontaneously sing it on key without the aid of a reference tone.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Auditory category knowledge in experts and novices

2014

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What do listeners know about sounds that have a systematic organization? Research suggests that listeners store absolute pitch information as part of their representations for specific auditory experiences. It is unclear however, if such knowledge is abstracted beyond these experiences. In two studies we examined this question via a tone adjustment task in which listeners heard one of several target tones to be matched by adjusting the frequency of a subsequent starting tone. In the first experiment listeners estimated tones from one of three distributions differing in frequency range. The effect of tone matching in the three different distributions was then modeled using randomly generated data (RGD) to ascertain the degree to which individuals' estimates are affected by generalized note knowledge. Results showed that while listeners' estimates were similar to the RGD, indicating a central tendency effect reflective of the target tone distribution, listeners were more accurate than the RGD indicating that their estimates were affected by generalized note knowledge. The second experiment tested three groups of listeners who vary in the nature of their note knowledge. Specifically, absolute pitch (AP) possessors, non-AP listeners matched in musical expertise (ME), and non-AP musical novices (MN) adjusted tones from a micro-scale that included only two in-tune notes (B4 and C5). While tone estimates for all groups showed a central tendency effect reflective of the target tone distribution, each groups' estimates were more accurate than the RGD, indicating all listeners' estimates were guided by generalized note knowledge. Further, there was evidence that explicit note knowledge additionally influenced AP possessors' tone estimates, as tones closer to C5 had less error. Results indicate that everyday listeners possess generalized note knowledge that influences the perception of isolated tones and that this effect is made more evident with additional musical experience.

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Absolute pitch and pupillary response: Effects of timbre and key color

Cited by 25 publications

References 28 publications

Pupillary responses during lexical decisions vary with word frequency but not emotional valence

Pupillary responses during lexical decisions vary with word frequency but not emotional valence

Attentional flexibility and memory capacity in conductors and pianists

Auditory category knowledge in experts and novices

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