Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2022 Apr;151(4):2414. doi: 10.1121/10.0010123.
Absolute pitch (AP) possessors can identify musical notes without an external reference. Most AP studies have used musical instruments and pure tones for testing, rather than the human voice. However, the voice is crucial for human communication in both speech and music, and evidence for voice-specific neural processing mechanisms and brain regions suggests that AP processing of voice may be different. Here, musicians with AP or relative pitch (RP) completed online AP or RP note-naming tasks, respectively. Four synthetic sound categories were tested: voice, viola, simplified voice, and simplified viola. Simplified sounds had the same long-term spectral information but no temporal fluctuations (such as vibrato). The AP group was less accurate in judging the note names for voice than for viola in both the original and simplified conditions. A smaller, marginally significant effect was observed in the RP group. A voice disadvantage effect was also observed in a simple pitch discrimination task, even with simplified stimuli. To reconcile these results with voice-advantage effects in other domains, it is proposed that voices are processed in a way that voice- or speech-relevant features are facilitated at the expense of features that are less relevant to voice processing, such as fine-grained pitch information.
绝对音高（AP）拥有者可以在没有外部参考的情况下识别音符。大多数 AP 研究都使用乐器和纯音进行测试，而不是人声。然而，人声对于人类在言语和音乐中的交流至关重要，并且有证据表明存在特定于声音的神经处理机制和脑区，这表明人声的 AP 处理可能不同。在这里，具有绝对音高或相对音高的音乐家分别完成了在线绝对音高或相对音高音符命名任务。测试了四个合成声音类别：人声、中提琴、简化人声和简化中提琴。简化声音具有相同的长期频谱信息，但没有时间波动（如颤音）。在原始和简化条件下，AP 组在判断人声音符名称时的准确性均低于 viola 组。在 RP 组中观察到一个较小的、边缘显著的效应。即使使用简化刺激，在简单的音高辨别任务中也观察到了人声劣势效应。为了将这些结果与其他领域的人声优势效应相协调，提出人声的处理方式是以牺牲与声音处理不太相关的特征（例如精细的音高信息）为代价，促进与声音或言语相关的特征。
