Enculturation Effects of Musical Training on Pitch Discrimination

Enculturation Effects of Musical Training on Pitch Discrimination Greta D. Grannan-Rubenstein (ggrannan@oberlin.edu) William L. Grannan-Rubenstein (wgrannan@oberlin.edu) Paul H. Thibodeau (paul.thibodeau@oberlin.edu) Oberlin College Department of Psychology 120 West Lorain St; Oberlin, OH 44074 Abstract facilitate the emergence of an innate faculty for discrimination of domain-specific communicative categories (Chomsky, 1965; Lerdahl, 1992), or does it facilitate selective perception of learned communicative categories (Cutting & Rosner, 1974; Tomasello, 2008)? Existing research on pitch perception suggests that people with extensive professional musical training recognize and reproduce culturally familiar pitch-class sets better than people without such training (Smith et al., 1994). That is, musical training has been shown to facilitate discrimination between a prototypical pitch and a pitch that deviates slightly from this prototype. While this finding supports the hypothesis that musical training tunes people to familiar prototypical pitches, it does not rule out the possibility that musical training facilitates unfamiliar pitch discrimination as well (i.e., that musical training tunes people to variation in pitch more generally). Research on the acquisition and use of communicative categories in domains such as language and music is largely divided between approaches suggesting innate cognitive constraints on domain-specific communicative forms, and approaches suggesting domain-general mechanisms through which specific communicative forms are learned. The present study investigates the effect of greater or lesser enculturation in the communicative system of Western tonal music on peoples’ ability to discriminate culturally familiar and culturally unfamiliar pitch categories. The results indicate that while prior musical training affects peoples’ overall approach to pitch discrimination, the advantage is dependent on the familiarity (in both pitch and timbre) of the aural stimulus, and is negligible under conditions of maximal musical unfamiliarity. Observed differences in pitch discrimination ability therefore appear to result from enculturation effects of exposure to Western music, not from a relationship between musical training and innate perceptual categories. The Present Study Keywords: Auditory perception; auditory representation; music cognition; categorical perception; learning; enculturation Introduction Do people with extensive Western musical performance training differ in their ability to discriminate tones that vary in pitch frequency from people without such training? To what extent are differences between these groups a function of the familiarity of the frequencies (i.e., musical scale system) and timbres (i.e., musical instrument) in which sounded tones are presented? One possibility is that musical training tunes a person’s perceptual system to the continuous dimension of pitch. On this view, one would expect that people who are musically trained would outperform people who are untrained in their ability to discriminate small variations in pitch, irrespective of the familiarity of the tones. A second possibility, however, is that musical training facilitates the development of prototypical sound categories, such as the 12 pitch classes of Western tonal music. On this latter view, one would expect that musically trained participants would outperform untrained participants only in tasks in which they were asked to discriminate variations in pitch from familiar prototypes. These two hypotheses represent opposing answers to the underlying theoretical question: does perceptive and performative training within a communicative system To investigate how musical training affects the perception of pitch, we recruited people from two populations — one with extensive musical performance training and one without — for participation in a pitch discrimination task. In the task, participants were asked to identify sounds that deviated from a designated set: in some cases, the set included culturally familiar pitches (i.e., notes from the Western major scale); in others, the set included culturally unfamiliar pitches (i.e., notes from the scales used on Javanese pelog gamelans). Prior research utilizing a similar paradigm has shown that Western trained musicians outperform an untrained sample even on culturally unfamiliar pitches (Lynch et al., 1990; Lynch & Eilers, 1991, 1992). However, this research utilized small sets of tones within the context of a musical melody. We expended on this paradigm by broadening the number of tones, eliminating the melodic context (i.e., randomizing the order of presented pitches and standardizing the inter-stimulus interval), and adding a variable for timbre: in some cases sounds were presented in the musically familiar timbre of a violin, while in others the tone quality was flattened to a sine wave (Remez et al., 1981, 1994). The present study, therefore, is better able to address whether musically trained individuals are sensitive to deviations in pitch from an unfamiliar prototype when listening to isolated musical sounds.