Name:Simi Jassal

School/Affiliation:University of Toronto

Co-Authors:Mark Shmuckler, PhD

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

First-year Psychology PhD student at the University of Toronto. My research currently investigates the missing fundamental phenomenon. Most of my day is spent with music playing in the background.

Abstract:

Previous work investigating the missing fundamental (MF) has found that the occurrence of this phenomenon is influenced by demographic variables of the listeners (e.g., musical trained versus untrained), stimulus variables (e.g., pitch height, interval size, spectral content of the MF tones), and so on. This work, however, has typically employed isolated two note contexts, wherein listeners make pitch judgments of intervals in which the pitches of the MFs move in one direction (e.g., ascending) while the average content of the spectral information (the spectral centroid) moves in the opposite direction (e.g., descending). The current experiment extended such investigations, looking at MF perception in the context of melodic contour perception. In this study, musically trained and untrained listeners rated the melodic contour similarity of pairs of 8 note melodies. In these melodies either the contours of the MFs and spectral centroids matched in both dimensions (MF and spectral centroid had the same contour), only one dimension (MF contour the same; spectral centroid contour the same), or neither dimension. Similarity ratings revealed that both sets of listeners tracked the MF contour of these melodies, regardless of the contour of the spectral centroid. These findings suggest that, although demographic variables and stimulus centered variables affect MF percepts of isolated tones, musical context overrides such influences, driving percepts of the implied movement of the fundamental frequency. Current work extends these findings, examining whether this predominance of MF percepts arose due to the change in task from judging two-note intervals to judging contour similarity.