Learning a well-formed microtonal scale: Pitch intervals and event frequencies

Abstract

This study investigates learning interval structure and pitch occurrence frequency of a microtonal scale by two groups of musicians (one experienced in Western tonal music only, the other in several microtonal systems) and non-musicians. While musically untrained participants could rapidly learn the pitch occurrence frequency of this scale, learning microtonal pitch intervals was slow in musicians. Interestingly, microtonal musicians were the slowest in responding to deviant pitch intervals and timbre changes in microtonal melodies amongst the musicians. These results extend our recent observation of non-musicians’ ability to learn aspects of microtonal pitch intervals, suggesting that paradoxically, musicians do not adjust their learned expectations to microtonal systems as quickly as non-musicians.

Keywords:

• Music perception
• statistical learning
• microtonal scale
• pitch intervals
• event frequencies

Notes

¹ An alternative definition of 12TET is 12 equal divisions per octave (12-EDO) as described in Bailey, Cremel, and South (2014) and Milne, Sethares, and Plamondon (2008).

² As there are more male than female participants in the microtonal musician group, while more female than male participants in the general musician group, a separate mixed effects model was conducted with Gender as one of the fixed effects. However, it was not shown to be significant. Therefore, it has been excluded in the main analysis in the Results section.

³ D-prime calculation was not conducted with the overall hit and false alarm rates in order to avoid analysing overlapping data with the false alarm rates in trials with randomly located incongruent tones.