Subject: Re: Pitch learning (UNCLASSIFIED) From: "Scharine, Angelique (Civ,ARL/HRED)" <AScharine@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2007 08:24:31 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE Without purporting to have any theories about what is being learned, I'll share my own experience. As a child learning both violin and piano, I had some difficulty learning to tune my violin to the piano. I had difficulty telling when they were the same pitch, because the timbre was so different (neither instrument was of very good quality). This was before those neat little tuner gadgets. I finally achieved the task by learning that I could match my hum to the note of the piano and the note of the violin. If my humming was the same for both instruments, I was in tune. If not, I adjusted the violin. A. If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur. -Doug Larson, Olympic Gold Medalist (1902-1981) Angelique Scharine PhD Army Research Lab - HRED AMSRD-ARL-HR-SD APG, MD 21005-5425 (410) 278-5957 (landline) 298-5957 (dsn) (410) 278-3587 (fax) -----Original Message----- From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception [mailto:AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Ole Kühl Sent: Wednesday, February 07, 2007 5:21 AM To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx Subject: Pitch learning Martin Braun wrote: "It's timbre learning. Automatic association of timbre and chroma, the latter being derived from the summation of octave-spaced partials, results in a secure "secondary" pitch perception. An analogy is chord identification. Highly trained musicians can identify chord categories from the timbre of a chord." I find this idea very interesting, and believe it to be true as I have long suspected it to be the case that chord learning is actually timbre learning. If there is any empirical evidence for this I would be most grateful for the particulars. Incidentally, this seems to be not only a higher order function, but also an example of what in the lingo of cognitive semantics would be called conceptual integration or "blending". We could say that we conceptualize a pitch through the integration of information from two different domains: a perceived timbre domain and a learned schema for partials. Best Ole Ole Kühl kyhl@xxxxxxxx www.cogmus.com Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Caveats: NONE