Laterality effects in the processing of melody and timbre

Abstract

Abstraet--Laterality for the processing of melody and timbre was investigated in 64 right-handed non-musicians. In one block of dichotic-listening trials, participants listened for a prespecified target melody, and in a second block they listened for a prespecified target instrument. Females were more accurate on the left ear in the melody task (whereas males tended to show no ear advantage), but there were no significant ear differences in the timbre task for either sex. This supports the idea of a complementary sex-based pattern of lateralization, with males more strongly lateralized for verbal stimuli and females more strongly lateralized for non-verbal stimuli. No relation was observed between lambda measures for the two tasks, suggesting that laterality for melody processing is independent of laterality for timbre processing. © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd

The Effects of Bayan Tabla Timbre on Stimulus Discrimination and Perception of Music Emotion in a Dangdut Music Fans, Neutral, and Haters Group

“…The contribution of gender factors were also not found (p=0.059) means the ability to discriminate timbre was not controlled by the sex factor (Table 2 and Figure 2). These results support the findings of [14] that the ability of timbre discrimination between men and women were equal.…”

“…So during the process of musical timbre discrimination, in the right temporal cortex (right hemisphere) there was a process of harmony structure (spectral) discrimination and in the left hemisphere occurred a dynamics (attack or onset) discrimination and timbre of language. According to Boucher and Bryden [14] there was no difference in timbre discrimination ability between men and women. According Hajda [10] stimulus discrimination of timbre was defined as a subjective distinction on a number of auditory stimuli, in which the subject was directly listen to the differences in order to perceive the quality of the style of sound articulation.…”

Decrease of theta response in euthymic bipolar patients during an oddball paradigm

“…Functional neuroimaging studies showed association between discrimination of auditory stimulation and frontoparietal activation, particularly over the right hemisphere (Paquette et al 1996;Boucher and Bryden 1997;Zatorre 2001). In 6-8 Hz responses, the difference between groups became more prominent in response to target stimuli on the right hemisphere, which is a marker of activation deficit among patients with bipolar disorder when perceiving and discriminating pitch.…”

Sex Differences in Functional Cerebral Asymmetries in a Repeated Measures Design

“…Indeed, functional brain asymmetries of speech (Bryden, 1979;Franzon & Hughdahl, 1986;Hausmann et al, 1998;Shaywitz et al, 1995), spatial orientation (Chiarello, McMahon, & Schaffer, 1989;Corballis & Sidey, 1993;Waber, 1982;Witelson, 1976), and face recognition (Borod, Koff, & White, 1983;Rizzolatti & Buchtel, 1977) are known to be sex-dependent in humans. Although contradictions exist (Ashton & McFarland, 1991;Boucher & Bryden, 1997;Kimura & Harshmann, 1984), the majority of data demonstrate that the lateralization of these processes is more pronounced in males, while the lateralization pattern tends to be more symmetrical in women (Corballis & Sidey, 1993;Halpern, 1986Halpern, , 1996Hausmann et al, 1998;Hough, Daniel, Snow, O'Brien, & Hume, 1994;Inglis & Lawson, 1981;Inglis, Ruckman, Lawson, MacLean, & Monga, 1982;Juarez & Corsi-Cabrera, 1995;McGlone, 1977McGlone, , 1980Rasmjou, Hausmann, & Güntürkün, 1999;Shaywitz et al, 1995). Clinical data also support these findings.…”