Pitch Perception

Several reports have indicated a higher incidence of absolute pitch in blind than in sighted musicians. Employing a pitch memory task, we examined whether a blind absolute pitch musician would rely on di¡erent neural correlates than a group of sighted absolute pitch musicians.The blind musician showed signi¢cantly more activation of bihemispheric visual association areas, lingual gyrus, parietal and frontal areas than the sighted musicians. Sighted musicians showed more activation of the right primary auditory cortex and the cerebellum when compared with the blind musician. These di¡erences in the activation pattern suggest the use of a di¡erent neural network including visual association areas while performing pitch categorization and identi¢cation in this blind musician in comparison with sighted musicians.

In the stop-signal paradigm, fast responses are harder to inhibit than slow responses, so subjects must balance speed on the go task with successful stopping in the stop task. In theory, subjects achieve this balance by adjusting response thresholds for the go task, making proactive adjustments in response to instructions that indicate that relevant stop signals are likely to occur. We report five experiments that tested this theoretical claim, presenting cues that indicated whether or not stop signals were relevant for the next few trials. Subjects made proactive response-strategy adjustments in each experiment: diffusion-model fits showed that response threshold increased when subjects expected stop signals to occur, slowing go responses and increasing accuracy. Furthermore, our results show that subjects can make proactive response-strategy adjustments on a trial-by-trial basis, suggesting a flexible cognitive system that can proactively adjust itself in changing environments. Keywords response strategies; proactive control adjustments; stop-signal paradigm; reaction time models Cognitive control processes are required to achieve a balance between competing goals in everchanging environments (Baddeley, 1996; Logan, 1985; Miller & Cohen, 2001). These control processes allow people to adjust response strategies in cognitively demanding situations. Response-strategy adjustments are typically investigated by manipulating task instructions (e.g.,

Previous research has uncovered ethnicity effects in pitch processing among highly trained musicians. Absolute pitch (AP), the rare ability to identify or produce by name (e.g., C, C , D) a musical pitch without a reference tone, is more common among East Asians than among non-Asians (e.g.

In studies of pitch processing, a fundamental question is whether shared neural mechanisms at higher cortical levels are engaged for pitch perception of linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. Positron emission tomography (PET) was used in a crosslinguistic study to compare pitch processing in native speakers of two tone languages (that is, languages in which variations in pitch patterns are used to distinguish lexical meaning), Chinese and Thai, with those of English, a nontone language. Five subjects from each language group were scanned under three active tasks (tone, pitch, and consonant) that required focused-attention, speeded-response, auditory discrimination judgments, and one passive baseline as silence. Subjects were instructed to judge pitch patterns of Thai lexical tones in the tone condition; pitch patterns of nonspeech stimuli in the pitch condition; syllable-initial consonants in the consonant condition. Analysis was carried out by paired-image subtraction. Whe...

Perceptual similarities of musical tones separated by octave intervals are known as octave equivalence (OE). Peter et al. [(2008). Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Speech Prosody, edited S. Maduerira, C. Reis, and P. Barbosa, Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences, Campinas, pp. 731–734] found evidence of octave-shifted pitch matching (OSPM) in children during verbal imitation tasks, implying OE in speech tokens. This study evaluated the role of lexical stress and speech sound disorder (SSD) in OSPM. Eleven children with SSD and 11 controls imitated low-pitched nonwords. Stimulus/response f0 ratios were computed. OSPM was expressed preferentially in stressed vowels. SSD was associated with reduced expression of OSPM in unstressed vowels only. Results are consistent with the psycholinguistic prominence of lexical stress and prosodic deficits in SSD.

Perceptual similarities of musical tones separated by octave intervals are known as octave equivalence ͑OE͒. Peter et al. ͓͑2008͒. Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Speech Prosody, edited S. Maduerira, C. Reis, and P. Barbosa, Luso-Brazilian Association of Speech Sciences, Campinas, pp. 731-734͔ found evidence of octave-shifted pitch matching ͑OSPM͒ in children during verbal imitation tasks, implying OE in speech tokens. This study evaluated the role of lexical stress and speech sound disorder ͑SSD͒ in OSPM. Eleven children with SSD and 11 controls imitated low-pitched nonwords. Stimulus/response f 0 ratios were computed. OSPM was expressed preferentially in stressed vowels. SSD was associated with reduced expression of OSPM in unstressed vowels only. Results are consistent with the psycholinguistic prominence of lexical stress and prosodic deficits in SSD.

The memory trace of the pitch sensation induced by a standard tone (S) can be strongly degraded by subsequently intervening sounds (I). Deutsch [Science 168, 1604–1605 (1970)] suggested that the degradation is much weaker when the I sounds are words than when they are tones. In Deutsch’s study, however, the pitch relations between S and the I words were not controlled. The first experiment reported here was similar to that of Deutsch except that the speech and nonspeech stimuli used as I sounds were matched in pitch. The speech stimuli were monosyllabic words derived from recordings of a real voice, whereas the nonspeech stimuli were harmonic complex tones with a flat spectral profile. These two kinds of I sounds were presented at a variable pitch distance (Δ-pitch) from the S tone. In a same/different paradigm, S had to be compared with a tone presented 6 s later; this comparison tone could be either identical to S or shifted in pitch by ±75 cents. The nature of the I sounds (spoke...

Proficient bilingual listening requires differential processing of sound variation in each language context. We considered context-based processing of pitch information by Mandarin-English bilinguals, for whom pitch indicates word distinctions in one language but not the other. In an eye-tracked word-learning experiment, 58 bilinguals and 28 English monolinguals each learned English-like and Mandarin-like wordsets, words referring to images. Wordsets differed primarily in that English-like words contained final consonants. We explained that some words might differ only in their pitch patterns, and included training on minimal tone pairs. In test, two pictures appeared on the screen with referents differing in either tone or vowel. One picture was labeled. Bilinguals processed tones more efficiently (t(78) = 3.54, p = .001) and more accurately (t(84) = 3.78, p < .001) than monolinguals only in the Mandarin context. Mandarin-English bilinguals thus appear to tailor tone processing ...

Strong cross-modal interactions exist between visual and auditory processing. The relative contributions of perceptual versus decision-related processes to such interactions are only beginning to be understood. We used methodological and statistical approaches to control for potential decision-related contributions such as response interference, decisional criterion shift, and strategy selection. Participants were presented with rising-, falling-, and constant-amplitude sounds and were asked to detect change (increase or decrease) in sound amplitude while ignoring an irrelevant visual cue of a disk that grew, shrank, or stayed constant in size. Across two experiments, testing context was manipulated by varying the grouping of visual cues during testing, and cross-modal congruency showed independent perceptual and decision-related effects. Whereas a change in testing context greatly affected criterion shifts, cross-modal effects on perceptual sensitivity remained relatively consistent. In general, participants were more sensitive to increases in sound amplitude and less sensitive to sounds paired with dynamic visual cues. As compared with incongruent visual cues, congruent cues enhanced detection of amplitude decreases, but not increases. These findings suggest that the relative contributions of perceptual and decisional processing and the impacts of these processes on cross-modal interactions can vary significantly depending on asymmetries in within-modal processing, as well as consistencies in cross-modal dynamics. Keywords Cross-modal interactions. Motion in depth. Looming. Audiovisual. Visual capture Successful exploration of the environment often involves evaluating and comparing information from multiple modalities and along multiple dimensions. Cross-modal interactions in perception have been studied using behavioral and physiological measures (Alais, Newell, & Mamassian, 2010; Calvert, Spence, & Stein, 2004). Intersensory conflicts are often introduced in behavioral studies of cross-modal interaction (Soto-Faraco, Spence, Lloyd, & Kingstone, 2004b; Spence, 2011). Participants are asked to attend to signals from a target modality (e.g., audition) while ignoring potentially conflicting signals from an irrelevant modality (e.g., vision). In general, these studies demonstrate that the integration of multimodal stimuli depends on the temporal (

The basic frequency selectivity in the listener's hearing is often characterized by auditory filters. These filters are determined through listening tests, which estimate the masking threshold as a function of frequency of the tone and the bandwidth of the masking sound. The auditory filters have been shown to be wider for listeners with sensorineural impairment. In a recent study (Christensen et al., 2017) it was demonstrated on group basis that the distortion product stimulus ratio that provided the strongest 2 f 1 − f 2 component at low frequencies had a strong correlation to the theoretical relation between frequency and auditory filter bandwidth, described by the equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB, Glasberg and Moore, 1990). The purpose of the present study is to test whether a similar correlation exists on an individual basis at normal audiometric frequencies. The optimal 2 f 1 − f 2 DPOAE ratio is determined for stimulus ratios between 1.1 and 1.6, at fixed primary levels (L 1 /L 2 = 65/45 dB SPL). The auditory filters are determined using notched-noise method in a two alternative forced choice experiment with noise levels at 40 dB SPL/Hz. Optimal ratios and auditory filters are determined at 1, 2, and 4 kHz for 10 young normal-hearing subjects.

This study examined the role of GABAergic inhibition on direction-dependent sharpening of frequency tuning curves (FTCs) in bat inferior collicular (IC) neurons under free field stimulation conditions. The minimum threshold (MT) at the neurons best frequency (BF) and the sharpness (Q , Q , Q) of FTCs of most IC neurons increased as the sound direction changed from contralateral azimuths to 10 20 30 ipsilateral azimuths. The application of GABA antagonist, bicuculline, lowered all MTs but the application did not abolish A direction-dependent variation in MT. MTs determined during bicuculline application at 40 ipsilateral were still significantly higher than those determined at 408 contralateral (two-tailed paired t-test, P,0.0001). In contrast, although application of bicuculline essentially had no effect on the BFs of IC neurons, it differentially broadened neurons FTCs at different azimuths abolishing the direction-dependent sharpening of frequency tuning (i.e. Q values, two-tailed paired t-test, P,0.01). These data indicate that GABAergic inhibition makes n an important contribution to the direction-dependent frequency tuning of most IC neurons.

This study examined the effect of monaural middle ear destruction on postnatal development of auditory response properties of inferior collicular (IC) neurons of the laboratory mouse, Mus musculus. Monaural middle ear destruction was performed on juvenile and adult mice and the auditory response properties of neurons in both ICs were examined 4 weeks thereafter. IC neurons of control mice typically had lower minimum thresholds, larger dynamic ranges and greater Q 10 values than IC neurons of experimental juvenile and adult mice. In experimental mice, neurons in the ipsilateral IC (relative to the intact ear) typically had longer latencies, higher minimum thresholds, and smaller dynamic ranges than neurons in the contralateral IC. In experimental adult mice, neurons in the ipsilateral IC had sharper frequency tuning curves than neurons in the contralateral IC. Clear tonotopic organization was only observed in the IC of control mice and experimental adult mice. However, the correlation of increasing minimum threshold with best frequency was observed for IC neurons in control mice but not in experimental juvenile and adult mice. Possible mechanisms for these different response properties are discussed.

This study investigated the strength of sensory and cognitive components involved in musical priming. In Experiment 1, the harmonic function of the target chord and the number of pitch classes shared by the prime sequence and the target chord were manipulated. In Experiment 2, the temporal course of sensory and cognitive priming was investigated. For both musician and nonmusician listeners, cognitive priming systematically overruled sensory priming even at fast and very fast tempi (300 ms and 150 ms per chord). Cognitive priming continued to challenge sensory priming processes at extremely fast tempo (75 ms per chord) but only for participants who began the experimental session with slower tempi. This outcome suggests that the cognitive component is a fast-acting component that competes with sensory priming.

Previous experiments have indicated that monaural Temporal Fine Structure (mTFS) information aids Speech Reception. In these experiments mTFS was either kept or substituted using a tone-vocoder. Results showed that hearing-impaired subjects were not able to utilise mTFS information to the same degree as normal-hearing subjects. A first step towards a more ecological experiment would be to exploit the tone-vocoder paradigm in a simulated spatial setup, and measure binaural TFS (bTFS) benefit. However, by the introduction of a binaural tone-vocoder, a concern arose that artificial ITD cues pointing to a direction determined by the phase difference between the carriers of the two channels, would be introduced in addition to the intended removal of the original Interaural Time Difference (ITD) by vocoding. This experiment investigated this concern, by measuring speech reception for target speech presented against spatially separated speech maskers. 21 young normal hearing, 10 elderly normal hearing and 11 elderly hearing impaired subjects were tested in a fixed spatial condition with either the artificial ITD pointing forward (0º azimuth) or ±50º.

Auditory evoked magnetic fields of the human brain were recorded with a four-channel 1st order gradiometer. Pitch deviance in a sequence of repetitive tone pips elicited magnetic evoked-response changes with a topography suggesting that a neuronal mismatch process to the deviant tones activates the primary auditory cortex.

Instructed micro-tuning of a single note on the qin can be seen from the very earliest moments of written musical composition, the first indication marking of the oldest known manuscript of qin music and, for that matter, the oldest substantial surviving playable manuscript known. 碣⽯調幽蘭 Jié Shí Diào Yōu Lán, 'Stone Tablet Mode Secluded Orchid', a composition, written down in the Tang Dynasty, and currently in Japan, lays before us a song probably from the mid to late Han Dynasty. The first two characters of the manuscript represent an instruction to micro-tune a pressedstring note to bring it-and each subsequent note at that hui (mother of pearl harmonic) marker-in tune with an open string until the request is neutralised, much as sharps and flats are neutralised in Western music. This paper demonstrates that the author of the 幽蘭 Yōu Lán manuscript tuned the qin using only open strings with string three as the primary tuning note, and not by using the method employing only harmonics. This paper demonstrates that tuning the fundamentals of strings (open strings), rather than harmonics, produces different-and more accurate-pitches of the open strings, in particular the overwound strings one and two, due to their being foreshortened, i.e. they are the same length as strings an octave higher but have a greater diameter to compensate. The harmonics at the 5th hui therefore are out of tune with the fundamental due to this inharmonicity. The tuning of open strings also allows for micro-tonal pitches to harmonics passages enabling partial-semitone step chromaticism as a result. This paper demonstrates that a repair was undergone to a torn portion of the beginning passage by a person who was indeed in possession of the torn segment of the scroll, and/or with very accurate knowledge of the performance of the piece. It resolves a long-standing question regarding a subsequently poorly corrected character in this section of the manuscript in addition to demonstrating that a kind of vibrato between unisons on open strings and/or with harmonics played on different strings, by way of the beating of their slightly out of tune partials, resulting from good pure fifth 'pythagorean' tuning, was a desired function of the music, while additional unwritten vibrato, so common in the modern playing styles, is not only no longer required but countermands the clearly directed and desired purity of accurate internal intonation of pressed or open string notes, and also negating the affect of desirably mis-tuned unisons, both with, and without, harmonics.

BackgroundWhile 20% of schizophrenia patients worldwide speak tonal languages (e.g. Mandarin), studies are limited to Western-language patients. Western-language patients show tonal deficits that are related to impaired emotional processing of speech. However, language processing is minimally affected. In contrast, in Mandarin, syllables are voiced in one of four tones, with word meaning varying accordingly. We hypothesized that Mandarin-speaking schizophrenia patients would show impairments in underlying basic auditory processing that, unlike in Western groups, would relate to deficits in word recognition and social outcomes.MethodAltogether, 22 Mandarin-speaking schizophrenia patients and 44 matched healthy participants were recruited from New York City. The auditory tasks were: (1) tone matching; (2) distorted tunes; (3) Chinese word discrimination; (4) Chinese word identification. Social outcomes were measured by marital status, employment and most recent employment status.Resul...

Relations have been found among various continuous dimensions, including space and musical pitch. To probe the nature and development of space-pitch mappings, we tested 5-to 7-year-olds and adults (N = 69), who heard pitch intervals and were asked to choose the corresponding spatial representation. Results showed that children and adults both mapped pitches continuously onto space, although effects were stronger in older than younger children. Additionally, children's spatial and numerical skills were tested, showing a relation between children's spatial and pitch-matching skills, and between their spatial and numerical skills. However, pitch and number were not related, suggesting spatial underpinnings for pitch and number.

Recognition of a transposed sequence of three tones was tested under four conditions of tone context. The melodic sequence was presented either without context or embedded in one of three types of context that varied according to the number of musical rules applied in their derivation. The recognition test (two-alternative forced choice) involved detection of a shift of one semit of one tone of the sequence, the shift being to a tone either within or without the musical key of the sequence. In addition, the test sequences were transposed either to the tritone or to the dominant of the tonic of the original sequence. Results, replicated for both piano and sine-tone stimuli, indicated significant effects of contextual conditions, key of error, and key of transposition. Ease of recognition in transposition is related to the identification and application of rules defining structures among tones and among tone sets, and to the use of rules for detecting structural violations.

In the auditory modality, music and speech have high informational and emotional value for human beings. However, the degree of the functional specialization of the cortical and subcortical areas in encoding music and speech sounds is not yet known. We investigated the functional specialization of the human auditory system in processing music and speech by functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings. During recordings, the subjects were presented with saxophone sounds and pseudowords /ba:ba/ with comparable acoustical content. Our data show that areas encoding music and speech sounds differ in the temporal and frontal lobes. Moreover, slight variations in sound pitch and duration activated thalamic structures differentially. However, this was the case with speech sounds only while no such effect was evidenced with music sounds. Thus, our data reveal the existence of a functional specialization of the human brain in accurately representing sound information at both cortical and ...

The onset of pitch within an ongoing noise signal evokes a particular brain activity, the pitch onset response (POR). Using wholehead MEG, PORs to iterated rippled noise (IRN) and Huggins pitch (HP), representing prototypical pitch-in-noise signals, were measured in twenty subjects during a pitch identi¢cation task (333 Hz, 400 Hz, randomized). HP and IRN yielded similar responses, lateralized to the left hemisphere and peaking about 180 ms after pitch onset. The initial phase (140 ms) showed stronger activations to 400 than to 333 Hz whereas later stages (200^300 ms) showed target vs nontarget e¡ects.These results suggest, ¢rst, that di¡erent pitches converge into a common cortical representation and, second, that the POR encompasses various successive processing stages. NeuroReport 16:193^196

In the cortex of barbiturate-anesthetized cats, area AI was identified by its tonotopic organization, and single neurons in that field were examined with regard to the shapes of their spike count-versus-intensity functions, the organization of their frequency-intensity response areas, and their responses to wide-spectrum noise, using calibrated sealed stimulating systems. Neurons whose pure tone rate intensity functions were monotonic in shape displayed V-shaped response areas that were open-ended at high tone intensities. In contrast. cells displaying nonmonotonic tone intensity functions tended to have circumscribed response areas; these cells were responsive to tones over limited ranges of both frequency and intensity. Monotonic neurons almost always responded to wide-spectrum noise stimuli, while nonmonotonic neurons often did not. The mean minimum latent period of monotonic cells (14.0 ms) was significantly shorter than that for nonmonotonic neurons (19.1 ms). For those cells that responded to both tones and noise, minimum latent periods for the two stimuli were similar or identical. Monotonic neurons tended to be horizontally segregated from nonmonotonic neurons across AI's middle cortical layers. The implications of these data for the nature of some neural mechanisms underlying the stimulus selectivity of cortical cells are discussed auditory cortex, single neuron, tone, wide-spectrum noise

Most tone perception tests for Cantonese-speaking cochlear implant users have been based on tone identi® cation tasks which require signi® cant cognitive development to be successfully completed. Results from such tests suggest that cochlear implant child users are performing at about chance level and may not be receiving much information about pitch using the implant. This paper reports on the ability of cochlear implant child users to discriminate pitch variations in Cantonese by using an experimental procedure based on play audiometry. As part of the study, the usefulness of higher rates of electrode stimulation for aiding tone discrimination is also examined. Cochlear implant users are shown to derive su cient information about pitch to discriminate most tone contrasts relatively successfully, with performance being most variable for contrasts involving tones clustered in the lower register of the speaker's fundamental frequency range. Contrary to hypothesis, higher electrode stimulation rates are not found to oOE er signi® cant bene® ts for aiding pitch discrimination.

Objective: To develop and evaluate a test of the ability to process binaural temporal-fine-structure (TFS) information. The test was intended to provide a graded measure of TFS sensitivity for all listeners. Design: Sensitivity to TFS was assessed at a sensation level of 30 dB using the established TFS-LF test at centre frequencies of 250, 500 and 750 Hz, and using the new TFS-AF test, in which the interaural phase difference (IPD) was fixed and the frequency was adaptively varied. IPDs varied from 30 to 180. Study Sample: Nine young (19-25 years) and 23 older (47-84 years) listeners with normal hearing over the tested frequency range. Results: For the young listeners, thresholds on the TFS-AF test did not improve significantly with repeated testing. The rank-ordering of performance across listeners was independent of the size of the IPD, and moderate-to-strong correlations were observed between scores for the TFS-LF and TFS-AF tests. Older listeners who were unable to complete the TFS-LF test were all able to complete the TFS-AF test. Conclusions: No practice effects and strong correlations with an established test of binaural TFS sensitivity make the TFS-AF test a good candidate for the assessment of suprathreshold binaural processing.

Receiving a cochlear implant (CI) can improve fundamental frequency (F0) control for deaf individuals, resulting in increased vocal pitch control. However, it is unclear whether using bilateral CIs, which often result in mismatched pitch perception between ears, will counter this benefit. To investigate this, 23 bilateral CI users were asked to produce a sustained vocalization using one CI, the other CI, both CIs, or neither. Additionally, a set of eight normal hearing participants completed the sustained vocalization task as a control group. The results indicated that F0 control is worse with both CIs compared to using the ear that yields the lowest vocal variability. The results also indicated that there was a large range of F0 variability even for the relatively stable portion of the vocalization, spanning from 6 to 46 cents. These results suggest that bilateral CIs can detrimentally affect vocal control.

A flourishing line of evidence has highlighted the encoding of speech sounds in the subcortical auditory system as being shaped by acoustic, linguistic, and musical experience and training. And while the heritability of auditory speech as well as nonspeech processing has been suggested, the genetic determinants of subcortical speech processing have not yet been uncovered. Here, we postulated that the serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLPR), a common functional polymorphism located in the promoter region of the serotonin transporter gene (SLC6A4), is implicated in speech encoding in the human subcortical auditory pathway. Serotonin has been shown as essential for modulating the brain response to sound both cortically and subcortically, yet the genetic factors regulating this modulation regarding speech sounds have not been disclosed. We recorded the frequency following response, a biomarker of the neural tracking of speech sounds in the subcortical auditory pathway...

The purpose of this study is to develop a tool to assist speech therapy and rehabilitation, which focused on automatic scoring based on the comparison of the patient's speech with another normal speech on several aspects including pitch, vowel, voiced-unvoiced segments, strident fricative and sound intensity. The pitch estimation employed the use of cepstrum-based algorithm for its robustness; the vowel classification used multilayer perceptron (MLP) to classify vowel from pitch and formants; and the strident fricative detection was based on the major peak spectral intensity, location and the pitch existence in the segment. In order to evaluate the performance of the system, this study analyzed eight patient's speech recordings (four males, four females; 4-58-years-old), which had been recorded in previous study in cooperation with Taipei Veterans General Hospital and Taoyuan General Hospital. The experiment result on pitch algorithm showed that the cepstrum method had 5.3% ...

Different models of the binaural system make different predictions for the just-detectable interaural time difference (ITD) for sine tones. To test these models, ITD thresholds were measured for human listeners focusing on high- and low-frequency regions. The measured thresholds exhibited a minimum between 700 and 1,000 Hz. As the frequency increased above 1,000 Hz, thresholds rose faster than exponentially. Although finite thresholds could be measured at 1,400 Hz, experiments did not converge at 1,450 Hz and higher. A centroid computation along the interaural delay axis, within the context of the Jeffress model, can successfully simulate the minimum and the high-frequency dependence. In the limit of medium-low frequencies (f), where f . ITD < 1, mathematical approximations predict low-­ frequency slopes for the centroid model and for a rate-code model. It was found that measured thresholds were approximately inversely proportional to the frequency (slope = –1) in agreement with ...

The past two years has seen the introduction of the Speak speech encoding scheme for most patients using the Nucleus 22-channel cochlear prosthesis. This scheme, based on the Spectral Maxima Speech Processor (SMSP) developed at the University of Melbourne, uses a bank of 20 band-pass fIlters to present detailed spectral information to the intracochlear electrode array. Clinical trials of this speech processor have shown highly significant improvements over the previous Multipeak scheme in English, German, French and Japanese speaking patients. The largest improvements were evident for open-set testing in background noise, which represents a more realistic measure of everyday benefit than testing in quiet The latest results for adulls who have changed from Multipeak to Speak will be presented, along with results over time for newly-implanted patients using the Speak scheme. New research aimed at improving the speech procc.<;;sing in both the s~ctral and temporal domains will also ...

In the present study we examine the ability of humans to acquire knowledge via passive exposure to a new musical system. We designed two new musical grammars based on a non-Western tuning system, and created melodies as legal exemplars of each grammar. In two experiments each participant was exposed to a set of melodies from one grammar. Several tests were conducted to assess learning, including forced-choice recognition and generalization, pre-and post-exposure probe tone ratings, and subjective preference ratings. In Experiment 1, five melodies were presented repeatedly. Participants correctly recognized and preferred melodies they had heard, but failed to generalize their recognition to new exemplars of the same grammar. In Experiment 2, 15 melodies were presented repeatedly. Participants showed some tendency to make generalizations about new melodies in their given grammar, and also showed an increased sensitivity to the statistics of the musical grammar following exposure. Resu...

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of combined hearing and tinnitus masking devices that are appropriately programmed for acoustic stimulations using wide-band noise over the specific frequency range of tinnitus. Material and Methods: A total of 21 patients were randomly divided into 2 groups. Group I (12 patients) was managed with betahistine dihydrochloride (2HCl) and fitted either with a combined hearing aid or a sound generator, and group II (9 patients) was treated with betahistine 2HCl for 3 months. Audiological tests, pitch matching to determine the frequency of tinnitus, an assessment of tinnitus severity, and subjective scores (visual analog scale, VAS; Mini-Tinnitus Questionnaire) were used to assess the patients in both groups, and a loudness scale was also analyzed in group I. The results were evaluated in a double-blinded manner. Results: Significant decreases in the severity of tinnitus, Mini-Tinnitus Questionnaire score and VAS were observed i...

Functional organization is a key feature of the neocortex that often guides studies of sensory processing, development, and plasticity. Tonotopy, which arises from the transduction properties of the cochlea, is the most widely studied organizational feature in auditory cortex; however, in order to process complex sounds, cortical regions are likely specialized for higher order features. Here, motivated by the prevalence of frequency modulations in mouse ultrasonic vocalizations and aided by the use of a multiscale imaging approach, we uncover a functional organization across the extent of auditory cortex for the rate of frequency modulated (FM) sweeps. In particular, using two-photon Ca 2+ imaging of layer 2/3 neurons, we identify a tone-insensitive region at the border of AI and AAF. This central sweep region behaves fundamentally differently from nearby neurons in AI and AII, responding preferentially to fast FM sweeps but not to tones or bandlimited noise. Together these findings define a second dimension of organization in the mouse auditory cortex for sweep rate complementary to that of tone frequency.

Functional organization is a key feature of the neocortex that often guides studies of sensory processing, development, and plasticity. Tonotopy, which arises from the transduction properties of the cochlea, is the most widely studied organizational feature in auditory cortex; however, in order to process complex sounds, cortical regions are likely specialized for higher order features. Here, motivated by the prevalence of frequency modulations in mouse ultrasonic vocalizations and aided by the use of a multiscale imaging approach, we uncover a functional organization across the extent of auditory cortex for the rate of frequency modulated (FM) sweeps. In particular, using two-photon Ca(2+) imaging of layer 2/3 neurons, we identify a tone-insensitive region at the border of AI and AAF. This central sweep region behaves fundamentally differently from nearby neurons in AI and AII, responding preferentially to fast FM sweeps but not to tones or bandlimited noise. Together these finding...

This paper proposes an extension of a method for time-frequency analysis of nonstationary harmonic signals: the Fan Chirp Transform (FChT). In its original form, the FChT considers that each fundamental frequency (along with the higher harmonics) of the signal may vary linearly in a period of time. This model, however, may be considered poor for some types of signals, especially those whose fundamental frequencies vary rapidly with time. By allowing quadratic frequency variation, this article presents a solution to this problem, which may be considered the next step of the FChT. The proposed technique is assessed in the context of music signals.

This paper presents a new method for sound synthesis. The method consists in mapping the histograms sequence of a cellular automata evolution onto a sound spectrogram. The data obtained from the histograms are in the form of sound spectral structures evolving in time in a natural fashion. The main problem of cellular automatas is the difficulty of control due to its unpredictability property. This mapping offers significant controllability characteristics which allow flexible processes for sound and instrument design. The sounds obtained with this mapping present natural behaviour and are capable of simulate acoustic instruments and other real sounds.