Tonal expectations influence pitch perception

Marmel, F.a, Tillmann, B.a, & Dowling, W.J.b

a. Université de Lyon (Lyon 1), CNRS-UMR 5020, IFR 19, France

b. School of Behavioral & Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to

Frédéric Marmel

Université Claude Bernard - Lyon I

CNRS UMR 5020

Neurosciences Sensorielles Comportement Cognition

50 Av. Tony Garnier

F-69366 Lyon Cedex 07, France

Tel : +33 (0) 4 37 28 74 90

Fax : +33 (0) 4 37 28 76 01

frederic.marmel@olfac.univ-lyon1.fr

Acknowledgments:

This research was supported by the grant “Junior Research Team” of the French Ministry of Research.

Our study investigated the influence of tonal relatedness on pitch perception in melodies. Tonal expectations for target tones were manipulated in melodic contexts while controlling sensory expectations, thus allowing us to assess specifically the influence of tonal expectations on pitch perception. Three experiments provided converging evidence that tonal relatedness modulates pitch perception in non-musician listeners. Experiment 1 showed with a rating task the influence of the tonal relatedness of a target tone on listeners’ judgments of tuning/mistuning. Experiment 2 showed with a priming task that pitch processing of in-tune tones was faster for tonally related targets than for less-related targets. Experiment 3 showed with a comparison task that discrimination performance for small mistunings was better when the to-be-compared tones were tonally related to the melodic context. Findings were discussed in relation to psychoacoustic research on contextual pitch perception and to studies showing facilitation of early processing steps via knowledge- and attention-related processes.

Listening to music involves not just hearing successive sounds but also expecting future events on the basis of previous events. Western tonal music contains complex regularities that elicit expectations about future musical events. Musical regularities are based both on simple patterns like tone repetition, melodic contour and interval size, and more abstract patterns like tonal structure. The former elicit low-level, bottom-up expectations (referred to hereafter as sensory expectations), and the latter elicit cognitive, knowledge-based expectations (referred to hereafter as cognitive expectations). Numerous studies have highlighted the role of tonal structure on musical processing (see Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006; Francès, 1958; Krumhansl, 1990; Tillmann, Bharucha, & Bigand, 2000 for reviews). One of the key findings was that even nonmusicians have acquired implicit knowledge of the abstract regularities defining tonal structure, and that this knowledge allows for cognitive tonal expectancy formation. However, it remains to be shown which levels of music processing are influenced by cognitive expectations and whether these expectations can have perceptual effects. Our present study investigates the influence of listeners’ tonal expectations on pitch processing. Using musical material whose perception invokes listeners’ tonal knowledge allows us to investigate the influence of higher level, top-down processes on low-level perceptual processes. Studying perceptual effects of tonal expectations thus extends psychoacoustic research that investigates - in addition to the operation of peripheral processors - the influence of more “central factors” on sound processing (e.g., Watson & Foyle, 1985).

Cognitive expectations in music perception can be linked to the tonal structure of the Western musical system. Tonal structure refers to an abstract system of relations among musical tones, which can be described in terms of contextually determined probabilities of occurrence (including association strengths). In the Western tonal system, twelve pitch classes (C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, B) are organized in subsets of seven that define tonalities (or keys). Inside a key, the seven pitch classes are hierarchically organized in accordance with the importance of their tonal function. The highest rank in tonal hierarchy is the tonic (i.e., the first degree of the musical scale), which is the most stable tonal function and represents the anchor point of a key (Krumhansl, 1990). The tonic usually serves as the terminal event in a musical phrase and produces a sense of closure and completion. In the tonal hierarchy, the tonic is followed by the dominant (the fifth degree of the scale), the mediant (third degree), the subdominant (fourth degree) and then the other in-key tones, with the leading tone (seventh degree) being at the lowest rank in tonal hierarchy among the in-key tones. Since the tonal system is based on a restricted set of twelve tones, the structural role of a given tone depends on the tonal hierarchy instilled by a given key context. The same tone occurs in several keys and its tonal role (i.e., its tonal function) changes depending on the other tones of the context and its underlying key. For example, the tone C functions as the tonic in the key of C major (when the subset of tones included in the scale is C, D, E, F, G, A, B), but as the subdominant (fourth degree) in the key of G major (used subset: G, A, B, C, D, E, F#). In what follows a tone that has a high rank in the tonal hierarchy of the context key (e.g., the tone C in C major) is referred to as related to the tonal context, and a tone with a lower rank (e.g., the tone C in G major) is referred to as less related to the tonal context.