Bidirectional Interactions of Pitch and Time

EasyChair Preprint 10668

Abstract

Research into pitch perception and time perception has typically treated the two as independent processes. However, previous studies of music and speech perception have suggested that the brain integrates pitch and timing information in auditory perception. It has been well-established that the pitch of an auditory stimulus can influence a person’s perception of its duration and tempo. In contrast, little research has addressed the question of whether timing also influences perceived pitch – an effect that should similarly arise if the brain integrates pitch and time into a unified percept. We conducted a pair of experiments using similar two-alternative forced choice tasks to establish the bidirectional nature of pitch-time interactions in auditory perception. Experiment 1 tested the effect of pitch height on perceived mistiming, whereas Experiment 2 tested the effect of timing offset on pitch discrimination. We observed a strong bias to rate higher-octave probe tones as earlier than lower-octave probes with identical timing, as well as a strong bias to rate tones that arrive early as higher in pitch than those that arrive late. Together, these results suggest that pitch and time exert a bidirectional influence on one another, providing evidence of integrated processing of pitch and timing information in auditory perception. Identifying the mechanisms behind this pitch-time interaction will be critical for unifying theories of pitch and rhythm processing.

Keyphrases: illusion, perceptual bias, pitch, tempo, time perception

@booklet{EasyChair:10668,
  author    = {Jesse Pazdera and Laurel Trainor},
  title     = {Bidirectional Interactions of Pitch and Time},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10668},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}