| Dear John, A few scattershot brainstorming responses to your query . . . Mapping the one-dimensional percptual attribute of pitch on a vertical high-low scale intuitively seems like it ought to be a universal, though your research has shown that it is not. The ethnomusicological literature provides some additional evidence; Feld (1990) found that that Kaluli of Papua New Guinea mapped pitch on to a small to large continuum. Likewise Repp and Knoblich (2009) found that pianists, who are of course trained to read music with pitch on the vertical axis, have a bias in perceiving rising intervals as “going to the right” and falling intervals “going to the left”. Thus for some populations, cultural condition or musical practice can introduce alternatives to the “higher pitch is ‘up’” association, and hence its association with “up = more”. Best, Justin London Mellon Professor of Music and Cognitive Science, and the Humanities Carleton College On Mar 10, 2019, at 11:16 PM, John Neuhoff <JNEUHOFF@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: It seems almost a truism that there is greater variability among individuals in the perception of sonified versus visualized data sets. Yet, finding empirical studies to support this idea appears to be a challenge. For example, when representing data visually, larger data values are often represented with increasing vertical extent (e.g., taller bars in a bar graph). In most cases observers have almost unanimous agreement on which bar is higher. In audition the same data can be represented in the domain of musical pitch. High pitch can be used to represent large data values and low pitch can be used to represent small data values. However, there is greater disagreement among listeners in the case of sonification and the data value specified by pitch. In fact, listeners without musical training often are confused by the terms "high" and "low" as they pertain to musical pitch (Neuhoff, Knight, & Wayand, 2002). I would be grateful to learn of other examples of greater perceptual variability in the auditon versus vision, particulary as it pertains to data representation. Best, -John Neuhoff ___________________________ John G. NeuhoffProfessor Department of Psychology The College of Wooster Chair, Auditory Perception & Cognition Society |