Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. AP may be demonstrated using linguistic labelling, associating mental imagery with the note, or sensorimotor responses. For example, an AP possessor can accurately reproduce a heard tone on a musical instrument without "hunting" for the correct pitch.
A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower.
Auditory illusions are illusions of real sound or outside stimulus. These false perceptions are the equivalent of an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or sounds that should not be possible given the circumstance on how they were created.
The octave illusion is an auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1973. It is produced when two tones that are an octave apart are repeatedly played in alternation ("high-low-high-low") through stereo headphones. The same sequence is played to both ears simultaneously; however when the right ear receives the high tone, the left ear receives the low tone, and conversely. Instead of hearing two alternating pitches, most subjects instead hear a single tone that alternates between ears while at the same time its pitch alternates between high and low.
The tritone paradox is an auditory illusion in which a sequentially played pair of Shepard tones separated by an interval of a tritone, or half octave, is heard as ascending by some people and as descending by others. Different populations tend to favor one of a limited set of different spots around the chromatic circle as central to the set of "higher" tones. Roger Shepard in 1963 had argued that such tone pairs would be heard ambiguously as either ascending or descending. However, psychology of music researcher Diana Deutsch in 1986 discovered that when the judgments of individual listeners were considered separately, their judgments depended on the positions of the tones along the chromatic circle. For example, one listener would hear the tone pair C–F♯ as ascending and the tone pair G–C♯ as descending. Yet another listener would hear the tone pair C–F♯ as descending and the tone pair G–C♯ as ascending. Furthermore, the way these tone pairs were perceived varied depending on the listener's language or dialect.
Deutsch's scale illusion is an auditory illusion in which two series of unconnected notes appear to combine into a single recognisable melody, when played simultaneously into the left and right ears of a listener.
Amusia is a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition. Two main classifications of amusia exist: acquired amusia, which occurs as a result of brain damage, and congenital amusia, which results from a music-processing anomaly present since birth.
In music theory, pitch-class space is the circular space representing all the notes in a musical octave. In this space, there is no distinction between tones separated by an integral number of octaves. For example, C4, C5, and C6, though different pitches, are represented by the same point in pitch class space.
Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.
In music, tonal memory or "aural recall" is the ability to remember a specific tone after it has been heard. Tonal memory assists with staying in tune and may be developed through ear training. Extensive tonal memory may be recognized as an indication of potential compositional ability.
Musical memory refers to the ability to remember music-related information, such as melodic content and other progressions of tones or pitches. The differences found between linguistic memory and musical memory have led researchers to theorize that musical memory is encoded differently from language and may constitute an independent part of the phonological loop. The use of this term is problematic, however, since it implies input from a verbal system, whereas music is in principle nonverbal.
Illusory conjunctions are psychological effects in which participants combine features of two objects into one object. There are visual illusory conjunctions, auditory illusory conjunctions, and illusory conjunctions produced by combinations of visual and tactile stimuli. Visual illusory conjunctions are thought to occur due to a lack of visual spatial attention, which depends on fixation and the amount of time allotted to focus on an object. With a short span of time to interpret an object, blending of different aspects within a region of the visual field – like shapes and colors – can occasionally be skewed, which results in visual illusory conjunctions. For example, in a study designed by Anne Treisman and Schmidt, participants were required to view a visual presentation of numbers and shapes in different colors. Some shapes were larger than others but all shapes and numbers were evenly spaced and shown for just 200 ms. When the participants were asked to recall the shapes they reported answers such as a small green triangle instead of a small green circle. If the space between the objects is smaller, illusory conjunctions occur more often.
The neuroscience of music is the scientific study of brain-based mechanisms involved in the cognitive processes underlying music. These behaviours include music listening, performing, composing, reading, writing, and ancillary activities. It also is increasingly concerned with the brain basis for musical aesthetics and musical emotion. Scientists working in this field may have training in cognitive neuroscience, neurology, neuroanatomy, psychology, music theory, computer science, and other relevant fields.
Cognitive musicology is a branch of cognitive science concerned with computationally modeling musical knowledge with the goal of understanding both music and cognition.
Psychoacoustics is the branch of psychophysics involving the scientific study of the perception of sound by the human auditory system. It is the branch of science studying the psychological responses associated with sound including noise, speech, and music. Psychoacoustics is an interdisciplinary field including psychology, acoustics, electronic engineering, physics, biology, physiology, and computer science.
Change deafness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when, under certain circumstances, a physical change in an auditory stimulus goes unnoticed by the listener. There is uncertainty regarding the mechanisms by which changes to auditory stimuli go undetected, though scientific research has been done to determine the levels of processing at which these consciously undetected auditory changes are actually encoded. An understanding of the mechanisms underlying change deafness could offer insight on issues such as the completeness of our representation of the auditory environment, the limitations of the auditory perceptual system, and the relationship between the auditory system and memory. The phenomenon of change deafness is thought to be related to the interactions between high and low level processes that produce conscious experiences of auditory soundscapes.
In music cognition, melodic fission, is a phenomenon in which one line of pitches is heard as two or more separate melodic lines. This occurs when a phrase contains groups of pitches at two or more distinct registers or with two or more distinct timbres.
Interindividual differences in perception describes the effect that differences in brain structure or factors such as culture, upbringing and environment have on the perception of humans. Interindividual variability is usually regarded as a source of noise for research. However, in recent years, it has become an interesting source to study sensory mechanisms and understand human behavior. With the help of modern neuroimaging methods such as fMRI and EEG, individual differences in perception could be related to the underlying brain mechanisms. This has helped to explain differences in behavior and cognition across the population. The present study using MRS provides direct evidence showing that the excitatory process in the suprasensory areas is linked to the individual differences in visual motion perception. The neurotransmitter concentration in the higher areas that execute cognitive functions is related to the interindividual variability in the perception of visual motion. Common methods include studying the perception of illusions, as they can effectively demonstrate how different aspects such as culture, genetics and the environment can influence human behavior.
The speech-to-song illusion is an auditory illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch in 1995. A spoken phrase is repeated several times, without altering it in any way, and without providing any context. This repetition causes the phrase to transform perceptually from speech into song. Though mostly notable with languages that are non-tone, like English and German, it is possible to happen with tone languages, like Thai and Mandarin.
Lola L. Cuddy is a Canadian psychologist recognized for her contributions to the field of music psychology. She is a professor emerita in the Department of Psychology at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
