Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing.

ABSTRACT: Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear. We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon-the Tsimane', who live in relative isolation from Western culture-as well as US musicians and non-musicians. Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges. Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range. Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible. But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above

SUBMITTER: Jacoby N 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9907018 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature