Some might find my video lecture "The Pitch Height Metaphor" of interest. https://vimeo.com/34747210. The video discusses
pertinent literature, including Pratt (1930), Trimble (1934), Roffler & Butler (1968), Hofman & Van Opstal (1998), Hofman, Vlaming, Termeer & Opstal (2002), Bruce & Walker (2010), Choi & Walker (2010). I point to the importance of learning, but learning alone
doesn't account for the majority association of high pitch with high elevation across cultures. HRTFs appear to play a role.
David Huron
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vimeo.com
Why do we call high pitches "high" and low pitches "low"?
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From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Paweł Kuśmierek <pawel.kusmierek@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2019 5:37:38 AM
To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Research in Auditory Processing
I have not been following this thread so far, but looking back I do not see two JASA papers of Roffler and Bulter from 1968 mentioned, they are probably relevant... If they have been mentioned, sorry for the redundancy!
Pawel
Unless you are a 'cellist. When my 4 year old daughter started playing she was flummoxed by the notion that playing lower pitch meant rising on the fingerboard and vice versa.
- jonathan
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Jonathan Berger
The Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music
Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University
http://jonathanberger.net
On 2019-03-12 04:56, Axel Roebel wrote:
Hello
On 11/03/19 13:01, Peter Lennox wrote:
But I'm not sure that it's as intuitive to equate higher pitch= greater quantity. I mean, I can grasp it visually (I suppose one could try for an evolutionary argument – a higher pile= a greater quantity, or some such).
I am all for the evolutionary argument! In fact if you see this from a physical perspective (us living in a world) then larger bodies make lower
sounds. So the relation high = large cannot be linked to a predominant world experience (besides for musicians - see Neuhoff 2002 (:-) - but also for
musicians a high note is produced by a smaller instrument, so it depends on the context the person uses to interpret the data). For visual
presentations it seems hard to find situations where you need to look up for something smaller.
Best
Axel
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