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Context sensitivity and invariance in perception of octave-ambiguous tones

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Abstract

Three experiments investigated the influence of unambiguous (UA) context tones on the perception of octave-ambiguous (OA) tones. In Experiment 1, pairs of OA tones spanning a tritone interval were preceded by pairs of UA tones instantiating a rising or falling interval between the same pitch classes. Despite the inherent ambiguity of OA tritone pairs, most participants showed little or no priming when judging the OA tritone as rising or falling. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants compared the pitch heights of single OA and UA tones representing either the same pitch class or being a tritone apart. These judgments were strongly influenced by the pitch range of the UA tones, but only slightly by the spectral center of the OA tones. Thus, the perceived pitch height of single OA tones is context sensitive, but the perceived relative pitch height of two OA tones, as described in previous research on the “tritone paradox,” is largely invariant in UA tone contexts.

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Notes

  1. Experiments 1 and 2 had two sub-experiments each. The chronological sequence of experiments was 1A, 2A, 3, 2B, 1B.

  2. We used musicians as participants because they happened to be readily available, being regular research participants in rhythm and timing experiments in BHR’s lab.

  3. Although we are not concerned here with effects of linguistic background, we might mention that the group was very heterogeneous in that respect: It included native speakers of Cantonese (2), Mandarin (1), Korean (1), German (1), and British English (1), as well as native speakers of American or Canadian English with Chinese, Indian, or partially British parents; only two participants had a purely American linguistic background.

  4. Both authors also had shown positive priming in an earlier pilot run.

  5. One participant (JMT) gave predominantly “falling” responses, whereas two (Ce, Cl1) gave predominantly “rising” responses. Such strong biases towards one or another response are rarely found in the tritone paradox. By intervening between successive OA pairs, the UA pairs may have reduced sequential context effects among OA pairs and thereby disrupted the perceptual calibration that usually occurs during exposure to a set of OA tones.

  6. Although only one participant (Cl2) was a native speaker of British English, the average pattern curiously resembles that found previously with Southern British listeners (Deutsch, 1991) and also with a linguistically heterogeneous group of students in Canada (Dawe et al., 1998).

  7. Linguistic backgrounds were now as follows: Mandarin (2), Cantonese (1), Korean (1), German (1), British (2), American (3).

  8. A few responses that failed to register were also treated as “not sure” responses.

  9. It could also be argued that we did not give participants an opportunity to report high-frequency matches because the fundamental frequency range of our comparison tones extended only to about 1,000 Hz. However, the fact that no UA tone with a fundamental frequency between 500 and 1,000 Hz was ever chosen as a match for an OA tone makes it seem unlikely that even higher tones would have been selected if they had been available as choices.

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Acknowledgments

Research supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0642506 to BHR. Coauthor JMT was involved in this research as a volunteer research assistant during her senior year in Yale College. She helped design the experiments, performed data analyses, and wrote a report that was the germ of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT, 06511-6624, USA

    Bruno H. Repp

  2. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Jacqueline M. Thompson

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  1. Bruno H. Repp
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Correspondence to Bruno H. Repp.

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Repp, B.H., Thompson, J.M. Context sensitivity and invariance in perception of octave-ambiguous tones. Psychological Research 74, 437–456 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-009-0264-9

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