Interactions of Perceived Intensity, Duration, and Pitch in Pure Tone Sequences

Abstract

If one dimension of sound is manipulated in a way that suggests a particular rhythmic organization, does perception of other dimensions change in ways that are consistent with the same rhythmic organization? When subjects were asked to judge or adjust intensities of tones, rhythmic manipulations of pitch structure changed the perception of intensity. When subjects were asked to judge timing, rhythmic manipulations of intensity had a similar effect. Timing manipulations did not have an effect on judgments of pitch. The results indicate that temporal structure as a whole is more accessible than the individual physical manipulations that give rise to that structure. It may be concluded that the temporal structure itself, rather than pitches, intensities, and durations in isolation, is a perceptual object.

Accenting and detection of timing variations in tone sequences: Different kinds of accents have different effects

“…In earlier research, listeners' temporal variability ratings of accented sequences with no temporal deviation and with small negative deviations, which were of the same order as those used in this experiment, were found to be very similar (Tekman, 1997). Accented sequences with positive deviations of the same magnitude were much more likely to be rated as departing from temporal regularity.…”

“…However, there exists a body of empirical results indicating that listeners have a tendency to hear perceptual groups as they expect them to be-that is, separated from each other in time and initiated by sounds that are distinctive in terms of such qualities as intensity and pitch (Povel & Okkerman, 1981;Tekman, 1995Tekman, , 1997Tekman, , 1998Thomassen, 1982;Woodrow, 1909). One line of research that was specifically concerned with the perception of timing in tone sequences (Fitzgibbons, Pollatsek, & Thomas, 1974;Thorpe et al, 1988) revealed that adults and preschool children were better at detecting a longer interval between elements of one perceptual group than at detecting a similar interval between two perceptual groups.…”

“…386-389). Tekman (1997) found that increasing the intensity of some of the tones resulted in a bias to report that the tones were separated from preceding ones by unequal time intervals. This effect was larger if longer silent intervals preceded the higher intensity tones than if shorter intervals preceded them.…”

The Formation of Rhythmic Categories and Metric Priming

“…As metre is not the only contextual aspect that may influence rhythm identification, we suggest that other aspects of rhythm, such as global tempo (Handel 1993), loudness accents, articulation, and melodic structure (Tekman 1997), remain worthy of investigation (Honing 2002). The methodology that was developed and the results that were presented can contribute to a fuller understanding and validation of the computational models of quantisation and the theoretical accounts of rhythm perception (LonguetHiggins 1976;Desain and Honing 1991;Large and Kolen 1995) which are still in urgent need of empirical support (Desain et al 1998).…”

Coupling between perception and action timing during sensorimotor synchronization

“…That the observation only occurred in the 20% condition suggests a dependence on the regularity of the sequence structure and might be due to a rhythmic grouping effect based on temporal proximity. That is, high-pitch tones initiate perceptual groups such that intervals between groups are perceived as longer [4,15]. The timing adjustment would then compensate for the perceptual bias in order to restore regularity of the rhythmical sequence.…”