Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Pitch Perception”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 523 records · Page 29Linked to original sources
PubMed1995

Acceptable levels of tonal and broad-band repetitive and continuous sounds during the performance of nonauditory tasks.

Three groups of 24 subjects were exposed to a 1000-Hz tone or broad band noise in a sound chamber. During the exposures subjects were engaged in an easy reaction time test or a difficult grammatical reasoning test. For each exposure and work subjects adjusted the noise to a tolerance level defined by its interference with task performance. During the simple reaction-time task significantly higher sound-pressure levels were accepted than during the reasoning test. At the tonal exposure, much lower levels were accepted than during the exposure to broad-band noise. For continuous sound exposures much higher levels were accepted than for noncontinuous exposures. For tonal exposures the difference was approximately 5 dB, for the broad-band exposures approximately 9 dB. In a separate study the effects of the noncontinuity of the noise and pauses were analysed. The raised annoying effect of the noncontinuous noise was not more affected by the noncontinuity of the noise periods than by the noncontinuity of the pauses. The results imply that the annoying reactions to the sound will be increased for repetitive noise and that the reaction is highly influenced by the over-all noncontinuity of the exposure.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1995

Annoyance and discomfort during exposure to high-frequency noise from an ultrasonic washer.

Annoyance and discomfort during exposure to high-frequency noise from an ultrasonic washer have been examined in the experiments carried out with 10 subjects. After a short exposure during which the subjects rated their annoyance and discomfort, a broad-band noise was matched to the ultrasound. The subjects were exposed to three different levels of ultrasound on three different occasions. Analyses showed that ultrasound causes considerable annoyance and discomfort even for the lowest exposure levels. No significant difference between annoyance and discomfort was observed. The matchings indicated, however, that the A-weighting, i.e., the traditional rating technique used for noise evaluations, overestimated the high-frequency sound when evaluating annoyance and discomfort.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Identification of rat brainstem sites with neuronal Fos protein induced by acoustic stimulation with pure tones.

Induction of Fos, a proto-oncogene c-fos protein product, was immunohistochemically examined in the rat brainstem by using pure tone stimuli (0.25 kHz, 4kHz and 8 kHz) at 60 and 80 dB sound pressure levels for 30 min. In comparison with non-stimulated control rats, the brainstem of sound-stimulated rats exhibited distinct Fos-labeled neuronal cell nuclei in i) the ascending auditory nuclei, ii) the brainstem sites which receive afferents from the auditory nuclei, i.e. the pretectum and rostroventrolateral reticular nucleus, iii) the parvocellular part of the ventral lateral geniculate nucleus, lateral reticular nucleus, ventral border region of the spinal trigeminal nucleus, and the medial vestibular and spinal vestibular nuclei, all of which lack established auditory projections, and iv) the brainstem sites where some Fos-labeled neurons were present in controls. Sound stimulation at 80 dB led to widespread Fos-labeling in all these sites. Sound stimulation at 60 dB caused a decrease in number of positive cells in the brainstem sites and yielded a tone-dependent subregional distribution pattern in the dorsal cochlear nucleus and central nucleus of the inferior colliculus.

Animals↗
PubMed1985

The effect of type of hearing loss on hearing aid use.

This study examined the effect of type of loss and reduced PB discrimination on hours of daily hearing aid wear. Patient data were entered in one of four matrices designed to permit examination of one variable while balancing the effects of other variables. When the influences of amount of hearing loss, age, hearing aid experience, and employment status were balanced, no evidence was found that type or shape of loss influenced the number of hours of daily hearing aid use. When the data for each type/shape of loss were pooled without regard to amount of loss, age, aid experience, and employment status, hours of reported wear were least for those with normal hearing in the better ear (8 hours) and most for those with conductive components (15.8 hours). Since patients with conductive components had the largest hearing losses, it was concluded that hours of wear are influenced primarily by amount, not type of loss. Discrimination scores were examined within the same balanced design. Although PB max scores for patients with conductive components were systematically higher than scores for patients with sensorineural losses, the reported wear times were essentially the same. Previous findings that sensorineural hearing loss and reduced speech discrimination adversely influenced hearing aid wear were attributed to differences in amount of loss and other intervening psycho-socio-vocational variables.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

Auditory brainstem responses to single-slope stimuli. The influence of steepness and polarity.

Click polarity has little influence on brainstem potentials. We applied an auditory stimulus similar to a step function generated in a closed acoustic system. The influence of stimulus onset steepness (comprising rise time and intensity) on wave V latency and amplitude was investigated. A remarkable latency prolongation was observed for condensation (C) compared with rarefaction (R), if a sharp bend at the foot of the slope was avoided. The C latency lag was nearly the amount of rise time. The effect can be explained by cochlear travel time. Wave V amplitude for R slopes was significantly enhanced. At high intensity and short rise time, it reached twice the values found with C slopes, or with clicks of either polarity. Although the explanations found are not yet satisfactory, a clinical application in cochlear diagnosis is predictable.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Infants' and adults' use of duration and intensity cues in the segmentation of tone patterns.

Adults and 8-month-olds were presented with sequences in which every third complex tone was either longer or more intense. Segmentation was measured by comparing the detection of silent gaps inserted into three possible locations in each pattern: Silent gaps inserted at perceived segmentation boundaries are harder to detect than gaps within perceived phrases or groups. A go/no-go conditioned head-turn (hand-raising for adults) procedure was used. In Experiment 1, detection was worse for the gaps following the longer complex tones than for the gaps at the other locations, suggesting that the longer tones marked the ends of perceived groups for both infants and adults. Experiment 2 showed that an increase in intensity did not result in any systematic grouping at either age.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

The differentiation of rhythmic structure.

Listeners judged whether two five-tone nonmetric rhythms were the same or different. Each rhythm was presented one, two, or four times to study the process of perceptual differentiation. The results indicated that the listeners perceived these rhythms in terms of the grouping of the tones, and not in terms of the timing between the groups. Two rhythms that had the same perceptual grouping were judged as being identical, even if the timing between the groups was different. The perception of the groupings of tones developed gradually. If each rhythm was presented only once, then the listeners had only a global percept, focused on groups (runs) of three elements, and often judged two different rhythms as being identical. If the rhythms were presented two or four times, then the grouping of the tones became more differentiated and the listeners were less likely to judge different patterns as being identical. Thus, perception of auditory rhythmic structure appears to follow the same developmental process as the perception of visual spatial structure.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Amplitude discrimination of sinusoids and narrow-band noise with Rayleigh properties.

The ability of human observers to discriminate differences in the amplitude of sinusoids and narrow-band noises was measured by the rating method of detection theory. Although each sinusoid (always 1000 Hz) was presented at a fixed amplitude, its amplitude on any trial was drawn from one of two Rayleigh probability distributions that differed in mean amplitude: a signal distribution and a noise distribution. Similarly, the amplitudes of the narrow-band noises were distributed as the Rayleigh distribution by virtue of the reciprocal relation between their bandwidth (100 Hz centered on 1000 Hz) and duration (10 msec). The obtained psychometric functions showing the area under the ROC as a function of signal-to-noise ratio were similar for both kinds of signals and were displaced, on average, about 4 dB from an ideal observer's function. The slopes of the obtained functions were similar to those of an ideal observer using 1 degree of freedom--half the number available in Rayleigh noise.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Identification of microtonal melodies: effects of scale-step size, serial order, and training.

The perception of microtonal scales was investigated in a melodic identification task. In each trial, eight pure tones, equally-spaced in log frequency in the vicinity of 700 Hz, were presented in one of nine different serial orders. There were two experiments, each with 108 trials (six scales [tone sets] x nine serial orders x two repetitions). In each experiment, 30 subjects, half of whom were musically trained, were asked to match each melody to one of 9 visual representation (frequency-time grids). In Experiment 1, the six scales were spaced at intervals of 25, 33, 50, 67, 100, and 133 cents (100 cents = 1 semitone approximately 6% of frequency). Performance was worse for scale steps of 25 and 33 cents than it was for wider scale steps. There were no significant effects at other intervals, including the interval of 100 cents, implying that melodic pattern identification is unaffected by long-term experience of music in 12-tone equally tempered tuning (e.g., piano music). In Experiment 2, the six scales were spaced at smaller intervals, of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 cents. Performance for the three narrower scale steps was worse than that for the three wider scale steps. For some orders, performance for the narrowest scale step (10 cents) did not exceed chance. The smallest practical scale step for short microtonal melodies in a pattern-identification task was estimated as being 10-20 cents for chance performance, and 30-40 cents for asymptotic performance.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Additivity of loudness across critical bands: a critical test.

The use of magnitude estimation as well as axiomatic measurement theory has led to the suggestion that loudness adds across critical bands. In the present paper, we challenge this postulate by applying a more sensitive methodology, based on Falmagne's (1976) random conjoint measurement procedure. A necessary condition for additivity of loudness was investigated in tone complexes consisting of 2-kHz and 5-kHz (resp. 3-kHz) components; the results showed systematic deviations from additivity. We argue that these deviations are due to asymmetric masking of the higher component by the lower one, and we propose a tentative quantitative model to account for the data. Such a model is in line with results from tone-on-tone masking, which show masking to be effective over a range of several critical bands.

Auditory Threshold↗
PubMed1991

Time estimation and attentional perspective.

The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether the filled interval effect is influenced by different attentional perspectives of the same event. Musically sophisticated listeners were asked to compare the duration of paired melodies that varied both in lower order contour changes and the relative timing of higher order phrase periodicities. Results indicated that a given pair of melodies could produce over- or underestimations, depending on which hierarchical level of structure was selectively tracked. These findings are discussed in terms of a framework that links event coherence and dynamic attending modes to time-estimation activities.

Attention↗
PubMed1997

The representation of auditory source characteristics: simple geometric form.

Two experiments examined listeners' ability to discriminate the geometric shape of simple resonating bodies on the basis of their corresponding auditory attributes. In cross-modal matching tasks, subjects listened to recordings of pairs of metal bars (Experiment 1) or wooden bars (Experiment 2) struck in sequence and then selected a visual depiction of the bar cross sections that correctly represented their relative widths and heights from two opposing pairs presented on a computer screen. Multidimensional scaling solutions derived from matching scores for metal and wooden bars indicated that subjects' performance varied directly with increasing differences in the width/height (W/H) ratios of both sets of bars. Subsequent acoustic analyses revealed that the frequency components from torsional vibrational modes and the ratios of frequencies of transverse bending modes in the bars correlated strongly with both the bars' W/H ratios and bar coordinates in the multidimensional configurations. The results suggest that listeners can encode the auditory properties of sound sources by extracting certain invariant physical characteristics of their gross geometric properties from their acoustic behavior.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Understanding continuity effects with complex stimuli.

When a low-intensity stimulus A is alternated in time with a high-intensity stimulus B of relatively short duration, stimulus A is heard as continuous. This "continuity" effect is shown to occur even when the B stimulus is a series of sharp pulses at one rate and the A stimulus is a series of pulses at another rate which must produce a very different neural temporal pattern. Simple substitution models of the continuity effect are thus shown to be inadequate. A model is presented to make various types of continuity effects more understandable.

Adult↗