Musical Pitch

This paper focuses on the question of what music is, attempting to describe those features of music that generically distinguish it from other forms of animal and human communication — music's “design features”. The author suggests that music is generically inspired by musical motivation — an intrinsic motivation to share convergent intersubjective endstates - and is universally identifiable by the presence of musical pulse — a maintained and volitionally controlled attentional pulse — and/or musical pitch — a system for maintaining certain relationships between pitches. As such music's design features are viewed as providing an interpersonal framework for synchronous and group affective interaction. The implications of this approach to an evolutionary perspective on music and on arguments of the primary evolutionary functionality of musical abilities in human evolution are discussed.

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International Standard of Musical Pitch

Nature ◽

10.1038/142820a0 ◽

1938 ◽

Vol 142 (3601) ◽

pp. 820-821 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

G. W. C. KAYE

Keyword(s):

International Standard ◽

Musical Pitch

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Enhanced production and perception of musical pitch in tone language speakers

Attention Perception & Psychophysics ◽

10.3758/app.71.6.1385 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 71 (6) ◽

pp. 1385-1398 ◽

Cited By ~ 69

Author(s):

Peter Q. Pfordresher ◽

Steven Brown

Keyword(s):

Tone Language ◽

Enhanced Production ◽

Musical Pitch

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Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

10.31234/osf.io/8shg4 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Dominique T Vuvan ◽

Marília Nunes-Silva ◽

Isabelle Peretz

Keyword(s):

Meta Analysis ◽

Pitch Perception ◽

Developmental Trajectory ◽

Pitch Discrimination ◽

Major Theme ◽

Performance Gap ◽

Pitch Processing ◽

Congenital Amusia ◽

Musical Pitch ◽

Using Data

A major theme driving research in congenital amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, and the second is that amusia is specific to a musical pitch processing module. To interrogate these hypotheses, we performed a meta-analysis on two types of effect sizes contained within 42 studies in the amusia literature: the performance gap between amusics and controls on tasks of pitch discrimination, broadly defined, and the correlation between specifically acoustic pitch perception and musical pitch perception. To augment the correlation database, we also calculated this correlation using data from 106 participants tested by our own research group. We found strong evidence for the acoustic account of amusia. The magnitude of the performance gap was moderated by the size of pitch change, but not by whether the stimuli were composed of tones or speech. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between an individual's acoustic and musical pitch perception. However, individual cases show a double dissociation between acoustic and musical processing, which suggests that although most amusic cases are probably explainable by an acoustic deficit, there is heterogeneity within the disorder. Finally, we found that tonal language fluency does not influence the performance gap between amusics and controls, and that there was no evidence that amusics fare worse with pitch direction tasks than pitch discrimination tasks. These results constitute a quantitative review of the current literature of congenital amusia, and suggest several new directions for research, including the experimental induction of amusic behaviour through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the systematic exploration of the developmental trajectory of this disorder.

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