Past studies of object recognition in vision and language have shown that (1) identification of the larger structure of an object is possible even if its component units are ambiguous or missing, and (2) contexts often influence the perception of the component units. The present study asked whether a similar case could be found in audition, investigating (1) whether melody recognition would be possible with uncertain pitch cues, and (2) whether adding contextual information would enhance pitch perception. Sixteen musically trained listeners attempted to identify, on a piano keyboard, pitches of tones in three different context conditions: (1) single tones, (2) pairs of tones, and (3) familiar melodies. The pitch cues were weakened using bandpass filtered noises of varying bandwidths. With increasing bandwidth, listeners were less able to identify the pitches of the tones. However, they were able to name the melodies despite their inability to identify the individual notes. There was no effect of context; whether or not listeners heard single tones, pairs of tones, or melodies did not influence their pitch identification of the tones. Several possible explanations were discussed regarding types of information that listeners had access to, since they could not have relied on detailed features of the melodies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.19681 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Kim, Jung-Kyong |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Psychology) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002022757, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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