Demany L, Armand F
J Acoust Soc Am. 1984 Jul;76(1):57-66. doi: 10.1121/1.391006.
It has often been advanced that pitch is a two-dimensional perceptual attribute, its two dimensions being: (1) tone height, a perceptual quality monotonically related to frequency; and (2) tone chroma, a quality shared by tones forming an octave interval. However, given that many musically uneducated adults do not seem to perceive tone chroma, this model is controversial. We investigated the sensitivity of three-month-old infants to tone chroma by means of a behavioral habituation-dishabituation procedure. Infants were presented with two successive melodic sequences of pure tones, the second sequence being a distorted version of the first one. The distortion consisted in shifting the frequency of some of the original tones, through a seventh or a ninth for some infants, through an octave for others. In the former case, infants displayed significant novelty reactions. In the latter case, significant novelty reactions were observed when the two sequences differed in melodic contour, but not when they had the same contour. These results suggest that young infants are sensitive to both tone height and tone chroma, and thus that tone chroma perception does not necessitate some form of musical experience.
人们常常认为音高是一种二维感知属性，其两个维度分别是：（1）音高，一种与频率单调相关的感知特性；（2）音级，由构成八度音程的音调所共有的一种特性。然而，鉴于许多未受过音乐教育的成年人似乎无法感知音级，该模型存在争议。我们通过行为习惯化 - 去习惯化程序研究了三个月大婴儿对音级的敏感性。向婴儿呈现两个连续的纯音旋律序列，第二个序列是第一个序列的失真版本。失真在于将一些原始音调的频率进行了偏移，一些婴儿偏移了小七度或大九度，另一些婴儿偏移了一个八度。在前一种情况下，婴儿表现出明显的新奇反应。在后一种情况下，当两个序列在旋律轮廓上不同时观察到了明显的新奇反应，但当它们具有相同轮廓时则没有。这些结果表明，年幼的婴儿对音高和音级都很敏感，因此音级感知并不一定需要某种形式的音乐体验。
