Jesse Pazdera

Graduate Student
McMaster Univ
Email author

Pitch distorts auditory tempo judgments

Pazdera, J. K, & Trainor, L. J.

Hi! My name is Jesse Pazdera, and I'm a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Laurel Trainor at McMaster University. My research centers around auditory timing illusions and what they can teach us about how our brains process time. Click the link below if you'd like to chat about my recent research on how pitch distorts our perception of time!

Pitch distorts auditory tempo judgments

Pazdera, J. K, & Trainor, L. J.
Abstract

Accurate tempo-tracking in auditory perception helps us to direct our attention to critical moments in speech and music. However, past research suggests that perceived tempo can be distorted by other, nontemporal features of an auditory stimulus. For example, people tend to rate music as faster when it is played in a higher octave than when it is played in a lower octave. Yet, previous studies have typically compared only one lower register with one higher register. Given that factors such as cochlear sensitivity and pitch saliency also vary between octaves, we cannot conclusively assert based on a two-octave design that pitch height drives this illusory tempo effect. To disambiguate pitch height—which varies linearly across octaves—from confounding factors that vary nonlinearly across octaves, it is necessary to compare perceived tempo across several levels of pitch spanning the broader range of human hearing. To address this issue, we asked participants in a series of experiments to compare the tempo of various repeating tones spanning six octaves to a metronomic standard. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that piano tones produce nonlinear changes in perceived tempo across octaves, with perceived tempo increasing with pitch between the second and fourth octave yet decreasing above the sixth octave. Experiment 3 tested whether this nonlinearity was related to the low pitch salience of extremely high tones. We discuss possible explanations for acoustic influences on time perception, as well as the future modeling directions we will pursue.