Subject: pitch discrimination performance in musicians From: Christophe Micheyl <cmicheyl@xxxxxxxx> Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 09:29:06 -0600 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------050507060106010103090202 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Dear Roy and List, There are some published data on the question of pitch discrimination performance in musicians, compared to non-musicians. In particular: - Spiegel and Watson (1984) Performance on frequency-discrimination tasks by musicians and non-musicians. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 76, 1960-1965. - Kishon-Rabin, Amir, Vexler, and Zaltz (2001) Pitch discrimination: are professional musicians better than non-musicians? J Basic Clin Physiol Pharmacol 12, 125-143. - Micheyl, Delhommeau, Perrot, and Oxenham (2006) Influence of musical and psychoacoustical training on pitch discrimination. Hear. Res. 219, 36-47. The results of these studies concur to demonstrate statistically lower frequency- and F0-discrimination limens in musicians compared to non-musicians. It takes several hours of practice of the pitch-discrimination task, for the latter group to obtain thresholds that are as low (on average) as those of the musicians -- with substantial inter-individual differences in both initial performance and improvement (see Micheyl et al., 2006 for details). Christophe Micheyl Research Associate Department of Psychology University of Minnesota N640b Elliott Hall 75 East River Road Minneapolis MN 55455-0344 cmicheyl@xxxxxxxx Tel: 612 626 3291 Fax: 612 626 3359 Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2007 13:52:16 +0000 From: Roy Patterson <rdp1@xxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: Five string bass It is unlikely that it is the ears that are trained. It is more likely to be the brain, or the use of words to describe perceptions. But to begin with we need to understand just what it is that trained musicians can do with low notes that the rest of us can't. Do you really think they can reliably make finer pitch discriminations? I understand that they think they can, but is it true of the population of trained musicians? And if it is true, is it a big difference? If so, someone should try and demonstrate just how much better they are. Regards Roy P --------------050507060106010103090202 Content-Type: text/x-vcard; charset=utf-8; name="cmicheyl.vcf" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="cmicheyl.vcf" begin:vcard fn:Christophe Micheyl n:Micheyl;Christophe org:University of Minnesota;Department of Psychology adr;dom:75 East River Road;;N640b Elliott Hall;Minneapolis;MN;55455-0344 email;internet:cmicheyl@xxxxxxxx title:Research Associate tel;work:612 626 3291 tel;fax:612 626 3359 note:*** Note new address *** url:http://www.mit.edu/~cmicheyl version:2.1 end:vcard --------------050507060106010103090202--