Experiment 2

Experiment 1 showed that the tonal function of a target tone influences mistuning judgments. This paradigm required participants to make explicit judgments by using a graduated response for the mistuned tones. Experiment 2 tested whether the tonal context effect on pitch judgments observed in Experiment 1 also influences processing times, with the hypothesis that processing times would be faster for tonally related tones. Tonal relatedness effects on processing speed have been demonstrated with the priming paradigm for chords (e.g., Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1986; Bigand & Pineau, 1997). Participants make speeded binary judgments on a perceptual feature of the target chord that is manipulated independently of the target’s tonal relatedness. For example, participants can make sensory consonance/dissonance judgments of targets which contain a mistuned tone (or not). In-tune judgments are faster for related targets than for unrelated ones. Experiment 2 adapted the binary in-tune/out-of-tune speeded identification task to investigate the influence of tonal relatedness on pitch perception in melodies: we expected pitch processing to be faster for the related tonic tone than for the less-related subdominant tone.