Denham Susan L, Coath Martin, Háden Gábor P, Murray Fiona, Winkler István
Cognition Institute and School of Psychology, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.
Adv Exp Med Biol. 2016;894:409-417. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-25474-6_43.
Most people are able to recognise familiar tunes even when played in a different key. It is assumed that this depends on a general capacity for relative pitch perception; the ability to recognise the pattern of inter-note intervals that characterises the tune. However, when healthy adults are required to detect rare deviant melodic patterns in a sequence of randomly transposed standard patterns they perform close to chance. Musically experienced participants perform better than naïve participants, but even they find the task difficult, despite the fact that musical education includes training in interval recognition.To understand the source of this difficulty we designed an experiment to explore the relative influence of the size of within-pattern intervals and between-pattern transpositions on detecting deviant melodic patterns. We found that task difficulty increases when patterns contain large intervals (5-7 semitones) rather than small intervals (1-3 semitones). While task difficulty increases substantially when transpositions are introduced, the effect of transposition size (large vs small) is weaker. Increasing the range of permissible intervals to be used also makes the task more difficult. Furthermore, providing an initial exact repetition followed by subsequent transpositions does not improve performance. Although musical training correlates with task performance, we find no evidence that violations to musical intervals important in Western music (i.e. the perfect fifth or fourth) are more easily detected. In summary, relative pitch perception does not appear to be conducive to simple explanations based exclusively on invariant physical ratios.
大多数人即使听到以不同调演奏的熟悉曲调也能识别出来。据推测，这取决于相对音高感知的一般能力；即识别构成曲调的音符间音程模式的能力。然而，当要求健康成年人在一系列随机转调的标准模式中检测罕见的异常旋律模式时，他们的表现接近随机水平。有音乐经验的参与者比没有经验的参与者表现更好，但即便如此，他们也觉得这项任务很困难，尽管音乐教育包括音程识别方面的训练。为了理解这种困难的根源，我们设计了一项实验，以探究模式内音程大小和模式间转调对检测异常旋律模式的相对影响。我们发现，当模式包含大音程（5 - 7个半音）而不是小音程（1 - 3个半音）时，任务难度会增加。虽然引入转调时任务难度会大幅增加，但转调大小（大与小）的影响较弱。增加允许使用的音程范围也会使任务更难。此外，先提供一次精确重复然后再进行转调并不能提高表现。虽然音乐训练与任务表现相关，但我们没有发现证据表明更容易检测出西方音乐中重要的音程（即纯五度或纯四度）的违反情况。总之，相对音高感知似乎并不利于仅基于不变的物理比例进行简单解释。
