Seeing what you hear: Visual feedback improves pitch recognition

Abstract

The present study examined the effect of visual feedback on the ability to recognise and consolidate pitch information. We trained two groups of nonmusicians to play a piano piece by ear, having one group receiving uninterrupted audiovisual feedback, while allowing the other only to hear, but not see their hand on the keyboard. Results indicate that subjects for whom visual information was deprived showed significantly poorer ability to recognise pitches from the musical piece they had learned. These results are interesting since pitch recognition ability would not intuitively seem to rely on visual feedback. In addition, we show that subjects with previous experience in computer touch-typing made fewer errors during training when trained with no visual feedback, but did not show improved pitch recognition ability posttraining. Our results demonstrate how sensory redundancy increases robustness of learning, and further encourage the use of audiovisual training procedures for facilitating the learning of new skills.

Keywords:

• Crossmodal learning
• Audiovisual
• Music
• Pitch recognition

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the NIH (R01-DC-03663) (to ES), Dudley Allen Sargent Research Grant (to AL), and Boston University UROP Student Research Program (to ME). We also thank Aaron Seitz for his wise comments, Marie Forgeard for statistical advice, and Adam Boulanger for software support at initial stages.