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Dear Max, Congratulations on your first post – it’s a good one! Your question reminded me of a paper by
MacPherson & McDermott which I have seen in poster form and keep meaning to read
J They showed that frequency discrimination of inharmonic & harmonic sounds was “comparable” when presented with no silent gap, but that at long inter-stimulus
delays performance was better for the harmonic sounds. It may be that storing sounds in short-term (rather than echoic) memory is easier for the harmonic sounds because, as they argue, the F0 allows a “compressed” representation. So it may well be that for
a same-different judgement for short sounds and with only a short gap between them, the domains won’t have any effect but that could be that listeners aren’t really using “pitch” to do the task.
Interestingly, though, detection of FM in noise is easier for harmonic than for inharmonic sounds even though one can perform a within-sound comparison
of the pitch change – as shown back in 1989 by (self-promotion alert) Carlyon & Stubbs (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 85, p. 2563-2674). So it could be that presenting the stimuli in noise will require subjects to use “real” pitch, even without the need to store in
short-term memory, and then you might see the domain effects you are looking for and one could check for the use of different strategies by varying the ISI Hope this helps Bob From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Max Henry Hi folks. Long time listener, first time caller...
Some friends of mind are setting up an experiment with same/different judgements between pairs of sounds. They want to test sounds from a variety of domains: speech,
music, natural sounds, etc. One of the researchers suggested that listeners will have different listening strategies depending on the domain, and this might pose a problem for the experiment:
our sensitivity for difference in pitch, for example, might be very acute for musical sounds but much less-so for speech sounds. I have a hunch that if the stimuli were short enough, this might sidestep the problem. Ie, if I played you 250 milliseconds of speech, or 250 milliseconds of music,
you would not necessarily use any particular domain-specific listening strategy to tell the difference. It would simply be “sound.” I suspect this is because a sound that’s sufficiently short can stay entirely in echoic memory. For longer sounds, you have to consolidate the information somehow,
and the way that you consolidate it has to do with the kind of domain it falls into. For speech sounds, we can throw away the acute pitch information.
But that’s just a hunch. I’m wondering if this rings true for any of you, that is to say, if it reminds you of any particular research. I’d love to read about it. It's been a pleasure to follow these e-mails. I'm glad to finally have an excuse to write. Wishing you all well. Max Henry (he/his) Graduate Researcher and Teaching Assistant Music Technology Area McGill University. |