Micheyl Christophe, Delhommeau Karine, Perrot Xavier, Oxenham Andrew J
MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 50 Vassar Street, Bldg 36-758, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, USA.
Hear Res. 2006 Sep;219(1-2):36-47. doi: 10.1016/j.heares.2006.05.004. Epub 2006 Jul 12.
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.
本研究比较了音乐训练和心理声学训练对听觉音高辨别能力的影响。在第一个实验中,对30名古典音乐家和30名非音乐家测量了纯音和复合音的音高辨别阈值,他们均未接受过先前的心理声学训练。最初,非音乐家的平均阈值比古典音乐家的平均阈值大六倍多,并且在使用自适应双间隔强制选择程序进行2小时训练后,仍比古典音乐家的平均阈值大约大四倍;这一差异比先前研究表明的大两到三倍。音乐家的阈值接近早期心理声学研究中使用经过高度训练的听众测量的阈值,并且训练后几乎没有改善;这表明古典音乐训练可以导致最佳或接近最佳的音高辨别表现。进行了第二个实验,以确定非音乐家需要额外进行多少训练才能获得与实验1中古典音乐家一样低的阈值。八名没有接受过先前训练的新非音乐家总共进行了14小时的频率辨别任务练习。他们需要4到8小时的训练,其阈值才能变得与实验1中古典音乐家测量的阈值一样小。这些发现补充并限定了文献中关于音乐训练和心理声学训练对音高辨别表现各自影响的早期数据。