Enhancement of Speech-Relevant Auditory Acuity in Absolute Pitch Possessors

Masataka, Nobuo

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00101

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In order to confirm the major findings of previous studies about unusual musical sensitivity of children with ASD, subsidiary data were collected after the completion of the above experiments from all the participants about AP, the ability to identify the frequency or musical name of a specific tone, or to identify a tone without comparing it with any objective reference tone (Masataka, 2011). The parents of the participants were also interviewed to ask about instances of extraordinary musical memory in their children, which has been reported to occur often in association with ASD (Kanner, 1943).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Neurodiversity, Giftedness, and Aesthetic Perceptual Judgment of Music in Children with Autism

Masataka

2017

Front. Psychol.

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The author investigated the capability of aesthetic perceptual judgment of music in male children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when compared to age-matched typically developing (TD) male children. Nineteen boys between 4 and 7 years of age with ASD were compared to 28 TD boys while listening to musical stimuli of different aesthetic levels. The results from two musical experiments using the above participants, are described here. In the first study, responses to a Mozart minuet and a dissonant altered version of the same Mozart minuet were compared. In this first study, the results indicated that both ASD and TD males preferred listening to the original consonant version of the minuet over the altered dissonant version. With the same participants, the second experiment included musical stimuli from four renowned composers: Mozart and Bach’s musical works, both considered consonant in their harmonic structure, were compared with music from Schoenberg and Albinoni, two composers who wrote musical works considered exceedingly harmonically dissonant. In the second study, when the stimuli included consonant or dissonant musical stimuli from different composers, the children with ASD showed greater preference for the aesthetic quality of the highly dissonant music compared to the TD children. While children in both of the groups listened to the consonant stimuli of Mozart and Bach music for the same amount of time, the children with ASD listened to the dissonant music of Schoenberg and Albinoni longer than the TD children. As preferring dissonant music is more aesthetically demanding perceptually, these results suggest that ASD male children demonstrate an enhanced capability of aesthetic judgment of music. Subsidiary data collected after the completion of the experiment revealed that absolute pitch ability was prevalent only in the children with ASD, some of whom also possessed extraordinary musical memory. The implications of these results are discussed with reference to the broader notion of neurodiversity, a term coined to capture potentially gifted qualities in individuals diagnosed with ASD.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Neurodiversity, Giftedness, and Aesthetic Perceptual Judgment of Music in Children with Autism

Masataka

2017

Front. Psychol.

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“…Indeed, the distribution of the age of first formal musical training in a large number of individuals with AP can be modeled with a gamma function with a mode at 4–6 years (Levitin and Zatorre, 2003 ). Training that begins after the age of 9 very rarely leads to AP, and there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring it (Brady, 1970 ; Ward and Burns, 1999 ; Levitin and Rogers, 2005 ). The appropriate type of input, i.e., training associating absolute pitches to labels, thus needs to be available before the end of the critical period for AP to develop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch

Gervain

Vines

Chen

et al. 2013

Front. Syst. Neurosci.

132

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Absolute pitch, the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a sound without a reference point, has a critical period, i.e., it can only be acquired early in life. However, research has shown that histone-deacetylase inhibitors (HDAC inhibitors) enable adult mice to establish perceptual preferences that are otherwise impossible to acquire after youth. In humans, we found that adult men who took valproate (VPA) (a HDAC inhibitor) learned to identify pitch significantly better than those taking placebo—evidence that VPA facilitated critical-period learning in the adult human brain. Importantly, this result was not due to a general change in cognitive function, but rather a specific effect on a sensory task associated with a critical-period.

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“…From a behavioral perspective, evidence shows that pitch identification is more precise for iterated rippled noise, which provides temporal cues for pitch processing in the auditory pathway, than for narrow band noise, in which pitch information resides primarily on place cues ( Fujisaki and Kashino, 2005 ). Another study showed that musicians with high precision AP were more efficient in identifying speech syllables in an automated, bottom-up task than musicians with low performance in a pitch identification task ( Masataka, 2011 ). In a recent study, frequency resolution predicted performance at pitch labeling ( Reis et al, 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory temporal resolution and backward masking in musicians with absolute pitch

et al. 2023

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Among the many questions regarding the ability to effortlessly name musical notes without a reference, also known as absolute pitch, the neural processes by which this phenomenon operates are still a matter of debate. Although a perceptual subprocess is currently accepted by the literature, the participation of some aspects of auditory processing still needs to be determined. We conducted two experiments to investigate the relationship between absolute pitch and two aspects of auditory temporal processing, namely temporal resolution and backward masking. In the first experiment, musicians were organized into two groups according to the presence of absolute pitch, as determined by a pitch identification test, and compared regarding their performance in the Gaps-in-Noise test, a gap detection task for assessing temporal resolution. Despite the lack of statistically significant difference between the groups, the Gaps-in-Noise test measures were significant predictors of the measures for pitch naming precision, even after controlling for possible confounding variables. In the second experiment, another two groups of musicians with and without absolute pitch were submitted to the backward masking test, with no difference between the groups and no correlation between backward masking and absolute pitch measures. The results from both experiments suggest that only part of temporal processing is involved in absolute pitch, indicating that not all aspects of auditory perception are related to the perceptual subprocess. Possible explanations for these findings include the notable overlap of brain areas involved in both temporal resolution and absolute pitch, which is not present in the case of backward masking, and the relevance of temporal resolution to analyze the temporal fine structure of sound in pitch perception.

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Enhancement of Speech-Relevant Auditory Acuity in Absolute Pitch Possessors

Cited by 6 publications

References 28 publications

Neurodiversity, Giftedness, and Aesthetic Perceptual Judgment of Music in Children with Autism

Neurodiversity, Giftedness, and Aesthetic Perceptual Judgment of Music in Children with Autism

Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch

Auditory temporal resolution and backward masking in musicians with absolute pitch

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