Performance on frequency-discrimination tasks by musicians and nonmusicians

Abstract

Auditory discrimination abilities of professional musicians were compared with those of nonmusicians. The stimuli for the frequency-discrimination tasks were 300-msec sinusoidal tones, 300-msec square waves, and tone patterns consisting of ten 40-msec tones played sequentially. The musicians’ difference thresholds for single tones were between Δf /f=0.001 and 0.0045. One-half of the nonmusicians attained thresholds almost as low; the rest attained larger thresholds, up to Δf /f=0.017. The results for the pattern stimuli show a clearer separation between the nonmusicians and musicians, whose median difference thresholds were about three times smaller. However, nonmusician listeners who had previously trained with patterns not in the test set had different thresholds, substantially smaller than those obtained by the musicians. The appropriateness of preferential recruitment of musicians for psychoacoustic research is discussed. The responses to a musical background survey and correlations between the survey items and discrimination performance are contained in a supplement to this paper [PAPS JASMA 76, xxx-xx].

Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

“…Relatedly, electro and magnetoencephalography (EEG & MEG) data indicate enhanced cortical responses in musicians to the timbre of the specific instrument they perform (versus an instrument they do not), both in adults (Pantev et al, 2001;Shahin et al, 2003) and children (Shahin et al 2004;Trainor et al, 2003). Moreover, string and woodwind players -who constantly monitor and adjust the pitch they are producing -can discriminate frequency differences more finely than musicians who play fixed pitch instruments like piano (Micheyl et al, 2006;Spiegel & Watson, 1984).…”

“…A considerable body of research suggests that musicians tend to out-perform non-musicians in perceiving fine differences in a number of basic auditory properties, including frequency and/or pitch (Spiegel & Watson, 1984;Micheyl et al, 2006; Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Amir, Amir & Kishon-Rabin, 2003;Nikjeh, Lister & Frisch, 2009; Koelsch, Schröger & Tervaniemi, 1999; GENERALITY AND SPECIFICITY IN MUSICAL EXPERTISE EFFECTS 6 Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b), tone interval size (Zarate, Ritson & Poeppel, 2012Siegel & Siegel, 1977), temporal interval size (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006;Cicchini et al, 2012; Ehrle & Samson, 2005), and timbre (Pitt, 1994). Below, we review evidence for lower-level and contextually-relevant perceptual advantages in differently trained musician cohorts.…”

“…Relatedly, electro and magnetoencephalography (EEG & MEG) data indicate enhanced cortical responses in musicians to the timbre of the specific instrument they perform (versus an instrument they do not), both in adults (Pantev et al, 2001;Shahin et al, 2003) and children (Shahin et al 2004;Trainor et al, 2003). Moreover, string and woodwind players -who constantly monitor and adjust the pitch they are producing -can discriminate frequency differences more finely than musicians who play fixed pitch instruments like piano (Micheyl et al, 2006;Spiegel & Watson, 1984).Bowed string instruments like violin also differ from fixed-pitch instruments like piano in that string players make extensive use of vibrato -a periodic but non-sinusoidal oscillation in the frequency and amplitude of a given note (Papich & Rainbow, 1974; see Mellody & Wakefield, 2000, for discussion of violin vibrato signal properties). Violinists manipulate vibrato (i.e., rate and depth of amplitude modulation [AM] and frequency modulation [FM]) for expressive and stylistic reasons.…”

Influence of Musical Experience of Blind and Visually Impaired Young Persons on Performance in Selected Auditory Tasks

“…Thus, superior performance of B large subjects over the sighted reference group (R B, large ) and both groups of visually impaired subjects (VI no and VI small ) was confirmed in our pitchtimbre categorization experiment for the two most difficult conditions. Such performance of B large group was expected on the basis of earlier reports (Bogusz et al, 2012a;Wan et al, 2010;Gougoux et al, 2004;Tervaniemi et al, 2005;Spiegel, Watson, 1984).…”

“…As some of blind and visually impaired people are musically or auditory trained, it may be interesting to determine the effect of their musical experience on the ability to solve basic psychoacoustic tasks. A number of studies have shown that sighted musicians perform better than sighted non-musicians in tasks related to pitch discrimination (Tervaniemi et al, 2005;Spiegel, Watson, 1984) and that classical musical training can lead to optimal or nearly optimal pitch discrimination performance (Micheyl et al, 2006;Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001). A possible reason for such performance is that the pitch is a fundamental dimension of auditory perception, which plays a basic role in music, for example: pitch variations over time are used to convey melodies.…”