Observational studyProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Time-dependent discrimination advantages for harmonic sounds suggest efficient coding for memory.
Observational study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Divergent processing strategies for auditory sequence recognition in humans and zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata).Communications biology · 2026Article
- Role of harmonicity in counting and hearing out voices in polyphonic music: Effects of hearing loss.Hearing research · 2026Article
- Attention to memory: Asymmetric enhancement of mnemonic features in auditory working memory.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Optimized feature gains explain and predict successes and failures of human selective listening.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- From sound to source: Human and model recognition of environmental sounds.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Non-linear relationships between auditory mismatch responses and the inharmonicity of complex sounds.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Task-optimized models of sensory uncertainty reproduce human confidence judgments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Inharmonicity enhances brain signals of attentional capture and auditory stream segregation.Communications biology · 2025Article
- A deep learning framework for understanding cochlear implants.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Temporal Pitch Perception of Multi-Channel Stimuli by Cochlear-Implant Users.Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology : JARO · 2025Article
- The fundamental frequencies of our own voice.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Individual differences elucidate the perceptual benefits associated with robust temporal fine-structure processing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Individual Differences Elucidate the Perceptual Benefits Associated with Robust Temporal Fine-Structure Processing.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Not fully remembered, but not forgotten: interfering sounds worsen but do not eliminate the representation of pitch in working memory.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Benefits of Harmonicity for Hearing in Noise Are Limited to Detection and Pitch-Related Discrimination Tasks.Biology · 2023Article
- Model metamers reveal divergent invariances between biological and artificial neural networks.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Relative pitch representations and invariance to timbre.Cognition · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Perceptual systems have finite memory resources and must store incoming signals in compressed formats. To explore whether representations of a sound's pitch might derive from this need for compression, we compared discrimination of harmonic and inharmonic sounds across delays. In contrast to inharmonic spectra, harmonic spectra can be summarized, and thus compressed, using their fundamental frequency (f0). Participants heard two sounds and judged which was higher. Despite being comparable for sounds presented back-to-back, discrimination was better for harmonic than inharmonic stimuli when sounds were separated in time, implicating memory representations unique to harmonic sounds. Patterns of individual differences (correlations between thresholds in different conditions) indicated that listeners use different representations depending on the time delay between sounds, directly comparing the spectra of temporally adjacent sounds, but transitioning to comparing f0s across delays. The need to store sound in memory appears to determine reliance on f0-based pitch and may explain its importance in music, in which listeners must extract relationships between notes separated in time.
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