Re: Cariani's question: "What is the visual analogue of pitch?"

[John Neuhoff <jneuhoff@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephen Handel once said that an analogy between vision and audition could
be "seductive, but misleading". In my opinion, Kubovy & Van Valkenburg's
"Pitch is to space as audition is to vision" idea has some serious
drawbacks. See my comment on their paper:

Neuhoff, J. G. (2003) Pitch variation is unnecessary (and sometimes
insufficient) for the formation of auditory objects. Cognition. 87 (3)
219-224.

Available here:
http://jneuhoff.com/Cognition_Comment.pdf

________________________________
John G. Neuhoff
Department of Psychology
The College of Wooster
Wooster, OH 44691
Phone: 330-263-2475
Fax: 928-244-5577
http://jneuhoff.com

************************
"Ecological Psychoacoustics"
from Academic Press June, 2004
http://www.jneuhoff.com/ecopsyc.htm
************************************

> -----Original Message-----
> From: AUDITORY Research in Auditory Perception
> [mailto:AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA] On Behalf Of Michael Kubovy
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 6:02 AM
> To: AUDITORY@LISTS.MCGILL.CA
> Subject: Re: Cariani's question: "What is the visual analogue
> of pitch?"
>
> Dave van Valkenburg and I have addressed Peter Cariani's question
> ("what is the visual analogue of pitch?") at some length in
> an article,
> Kubovy, M. & Van Valkenburg, D. Auditory and visual objects.
> Cognition.
> 80(1-2):97-126, 2001 Jun, which can be downloaded from:
> (
> http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mk9y/mySite/papers/
> 2001.Cognition.v80(1%0A-2).pdf ).
>
> Our answer is that the question cannot be answered without
> distinguishing between different kinds of analogues. Insofar
> as pitch
> is central to the auditory "what", then the analogue is whatever
> sustains the visual "what", namely either space or spatial frequency
> (we focus on space in the article, but there's little reason to
> privilege either it or spatial frequency -- the analogy is at
> a level
> where sensory mechanisms are not at issue).