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The role of carrier spectral composition in the perception of musical pitch

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Abstract

Temporal envelope fluctuations of natural sounds convey critical information to speech and music processing. In particular, musical pitch perception is assumed to be primarily underlined by temporal envelope encoding. While increasing evidence demonstrates the importance of carrier fine structure to complex pitch perception, how carrier spectral information affects musical pitch perception is less clear. Here, transposed tones designed to convey identical envelope information across different carriers were used to assess the effects of carrier spectral composition to pitch discrimination and musical-interval and melody identifications. Results showed that pitch discrimination thresholds became lower (better) with increasing carrier frequencies from 1k to 10k Hz, with performance comparable to that of pure sinusoids. Musical interval and melody defined by the periodicity of sine- or harmonic complex envelopes across carriers were identified with greater than 85% accuracy even on a 10k-Hz carrier. Moreover, enhanced interval and melody identification performance was observed with increasing carrier frequency up to 6k Hz. Findings suggest a perceptual enhancement of temporal envelope information with increasing carrier spectral region in musical pitch processing, at least for frequencies up to 6k Hz. For carriers in the extended high-frequency region (8–20k Hz), the use of temporal envelope information to music pitch processing may vary depending on task requirement. Collectively, these results implicate the fidelity of temporal envelope information to musical pitch perception is more pronounced than previously considered, with ecological implications.

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Data Availability

The data for this study is available upon request to the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Wei-K. Liang and Prof. Kevin C. Hsu for their helpful comments and suggestions for this manuscript. We thank Yi-Zhong Huang for assistance in subject recruitment and data collection.

Open practice statements

The data and materials for all experiments are available upon request to the corresponding author. None of the experiments was preregistered.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan [Grant No. MOST109-2410-H-008-024; MOST109-2639-H-008-001-ASP; MOST110-2410-H-008-038-MY2].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, National Central University, No. 300, Zhongda Rd., Zhongli District, Taoyuan City, 320317, Taiwan

    Chao-Yin Kuo, Jia-Wei Liu, Chi-Hung Juan & I-Hui Hsieh

  2. Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, Tri-Service General Hospital, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei City, Taiwan

    Chao-Yin Kuo & Chih-Hung Wang

  3. Cognitive Intelligence and Precision Healthcare Center, National Central University, No. 300, Zhongda Rd., Zhongli District, Taoyuan City, 320317, Taiwan

    Chi-Hung Juan & I-Hui Hsieh

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  1. Chao-Yin Kuo
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Contributions

C.K., C.J., and I.H. designed the experiments. C.K., J.L., and I.H. programmed the auditory stimuli and experimental tasks. C.K. and J.L. conducted the experiments. I.H., C.J., and C.W. performed data analysis. C.K., J.L., and I.H. prepared the figures. All authors contributed to data interpretation and discussion. I.H. wrote the main manuscript text.

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Correspondence to I-Hui Hsieh.

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All experiments were approved by the Research Ethics Committee at National Taiwan University, Taiwan (NTU-REC No.: 202105EM029).

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Kuo, CY., Liu, JW., Wang, CH. et al. The role of carrier spectral composition in the perception of musical pitch. Atten Percept Psychophys 85, 2083–2099 (2023). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02761-x

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