Center for Neural Science, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, New York 10003, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2010 Oct;128(4):1943-51. doi: 10.1121/1.3478785.
Pitch intervals are central to most musical systems, which utilize pitch at the expense of other acoustic dimensions. It seemed plausible that pitch might uniquely permit precise perception of the interval separating two sounds, as this could help explain its importance in music. To explore this notion, a simple discrimination task was used to measure the precision of interval perception for the auditory dimensions of pitch, brightness, and loudness. Interval thresholds were then expressed in units of just-noticeable differences for each dimension, to enable comparison across dimensions. Contrary to expectation, when expressed in these common units, interval acuity was actually worse for pitch than for loudness or brightness. This likely indicates that the perceptual dimension of pitch is unusual not for interval perception per se, but rather for the basic frequency resolution it supports. The ubiquity of pitch in music may be due in part to this fine-grained basic resolution.
音高间隔是大多数音乐系统的核心，这些系统利用音高而牺牲其他声学维度。似乎有理由认为，音高可能独特地允许对两个声音之间的间隔进行精确感知，因为这有助于解释它在音乐中的重要性。为了探索这一概念，使用了一个简单的辨别任务来测量音高、亮度和响度这三个听觉维度的间隔感知精度。然后，将间隔阈值表示为每个维度的可觉察差异单位，以便在不同维度之间进行比较。出乎意料的是，当以这些常见单位表示时，音高的间隔敏锐度实际上比响度或亮度差。这可能表明，音高的感知维度并非因其本身的间隔感知，而是因为它支持的基本频率分辨率而不同寻常。音高在音乐中的普遍性部分可能归因于这种精细的基本分辨率。
