John Granzow

Supervisor: Dr. John Vokey

Research Interests:

What is Pitch? The question vexes now, as it did for Pythagoras who paused in front of the blacksmith’s shop, and pondered the various sounds the hammers made as they struck the anvil. We now know that pitch, as with color perception is a psychological construct. For example we can hear pitch even when the fundamental frequency (f0) that would normally be thought to engender it, is absent from a complex tone. This illusion of pitch in complex tones is analogous to the perception of color in complex visual scenes in that neither requires the relevant frequency of sound or light to be present to be perceived. Recent research into pitch perception has made use of the missing pitch illusion to speculate how experience might effect the way we perceive pitch. Musicians, for example, seem to respond to the missing fundamental illusion more reliably than those with little musical experience. Such results have led some theorists to infer perceptual differences from musical expertise effects (Seither-Preisler 2007). The expertise effect is surprising for several reasons: Hearing the pitch when when the fundamental frequency is absent is something we all do with language. The telephone is one context where everyone perceives pitch even though the technology does not provide the fundamental frequency. Second, the missing fundamental has been recovered from the auditory system as early as the inferior colliculus and it seems unlikely that musical experience could modify such early processing structures. In the wake of these and other findings, my research explores other possibilities for the effects of musical expertise and pitch perception.

My research also extends to prosody or the music of language. Recent studies comparing French and English revealed a correlation between prosody type and rhythmic variation in instrumental music associated with each language. This correlation is strongest in historic times of nationalism when composers would be less inclined to imitate music that corresponds to other languages (Aniruddh & Joseph, 2003). We are looking into such things as how production of second language prosody might be enhanced by exposure to rhythmic meters in music that positively correlate with the prosodic shape of the target language. This research might have important implications on music as a vehicle to second language learning.

References:

Aniruddh, P., & Joseph, D. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, B35-B45.

Seither-Preisler, A., Johnson, L., Krumbholz, K., Nobbe, A., Patterson, R., Seither, S., et al. (2007). Tone sequences with conflicting fundamental pitch and timbre changes are heard differently by musicians and nonmusicians. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33 (3), 743-751.