Abstract
This study compared the influence of musical and psychoacoustical
training on auditory pitch discrimination abilities. In a first experiment,
pitch discrimination thresholds for pure and complex tones were measured
in 30 classical musicians and 30 non-musicians, none of whom had
prior psychoacoustical training. The non-musicians' mean thresholds
were more than six times larger than those of the classical musicians
initially, and still about four times larger after 2h of training
using an adaptive two-interval forced-choice procedure; this difference
is two to three times larger than suggested by previous studies.
The musicians' thresholds were close to those measured in earlier
psychoacoustical studies using highly trained listeners, and showed
little improvement with training; this suggests that classical musical
training can lead to optimal or nearly optimal pitch discrimination
performance. A second experiment was performed to determine how much
additional training was required for the non-musicians to obtain
thresholds as low as those of the classical musicians from experiment
1. Eight new non-musicians with no prior training practiced the frequency
discrimination task for a total of 14 h. It took between 4 and 8h
of training for their thresholds to become as small as those measured
in the classical musicians from experiment 1. These findings supplement
and qualify earlier data in the literature regarding the respective
influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination
performance.
- acoustic
- discrimination,pitch
- discrimination:
- of
- physiology,differential
- physiology,dominance,humans,learning,music,pitch
- physiology,psychoacoustics,music,musicality,perception,pitch
- stimulation,adolescent,adult,analysis
- studies,cerebral,cerebral:
- threshold,differential
- threshold:
- variance,case-control
Users
Please
log in to take part in the discussion (add own reviews or comments).