Zohar Eitan
Tel Aviv University, Music, Faculty Member
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Crossmodal correspondences (CMC) systematically associate perceptual dimensions in different sensory modalities (e.g., auditory pitch and visual brightness), and affect perception, cognition, and action. While previous work typically... more
Crossmodal correspondences (CMC) systematically associate perceptual dimensions in different sensory modalities (e.g., auditory pitch and visual brightness), and affect perception, cognition, and action. While previous work typically investigated associations between basic perceptual dimensions, here we present a new type of CMC, involving a high-level, quasi-syntactic schema: music tonality. Tonality governs most Western music and regulates stability and tension in melodic and harmonic progressions. Musicians have long associated tonal stability with non-auditory domains, yet such correspondences have hardly been investigated empirically. Here, we investigated CMC between tonal stability and visual brightness, in musicians and in non-musicians, using explicit and implicit measures. On the explicit test, participants heard a tonality-establishing context followed by a probe tone, and matched each probe to one of several circles, varying in brightness. On the implicit test, we applie...
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Recent studies indicate that the ability to represent absolute pitch values in long-term memory (LTM), long believed to be the possession of a small minority of trained musicians endowed with "absolute pitch" (AP), is in fact... more
Recent studies indicate that the ability to represent absolute pitch values in long-term memory (LTM), long believed to be the possession of a small minority of trained musicians endowed with "absolute pitch" (AP), is in fact shared to some extent by a considerable proportion of the population. The current study examined whether this newly discovered ability affects aspects of music and auditory cognition, particularly pitch learning and evaluation. Our starting points are two well established premises: (1) frequency of occurrence has an influence on the way we process stimuli; (2) in Western music, some pitches and musical keys are much more frequent than others. Based on these premises, we hypothesize that if absolute pitch values are indeed represented in LTM, pitch frequency of occurrence in music would significantly affect cognitive processes, in particular pitch learning and evaluation. Two experiments were designed to test this hypothesis in participants with no AP,...
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The target article illustrates deep cross-cultural gaps, involving not only the representation of musical shape but also the notion of a musical object itself. Yet, numerous empirical findings suggest that important cross-modal... more
The target article illustrates deep cross-cultural gaps, involving not only the representation of musical shape but also the notion of a musical object itself. Yet, numerous empirical findings suggest that important cross-modal correspondences involving music and visual dimensions are inborn or learned at infancy, prior to the acquisition of language and most culture-specific behavior. Drawing on recent empirical work, the commentary attempts to reconcile this apparent disparity.
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Garner’s speeded discrimination paradigm is a central tool in studying crossmodal interaction, revealing automatic perceptual correspondences between dimensions in different modalities. To date, however, the paradigm has been used solely... more
Garner’s speeded discrimination paradigm is a central tool in studying crossmodal interaction, revealing automatic perceptual correspondences between dimensions in different modalities. To date, however, the paradigm has been used solely with static, unchanging stimuli, limiting its ecological validity. Here, we use Garner’s paradigm to examine interactions between dynamic (time-varying) audiovisual dimensions — pitch direction and vertical visual motion. In Experiment 1, 32 participants rapidly discriminated ascending vs. descending pitch glides, ignoring concurrent visual motion (auditory task), and ascending vs. descending visual motion, ignoring pitch change (visual task). Results in both tasks revealed strong congruence effects, but no Garner interference, an unusual pattern inconsistent with some interpretations of Garner interference. To examine whether this pattern of results is specific to dynamic stimuli, Experiment 2 (testing another 64 participants) used a modified Garne...
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Though the Perception of Musical Tension has recently received considerable attention, the effect of interactions among auditory parameters on perceived tension has hardly been examined systematically. In this study, 132 participants (60... more
Though the Perception of Musical Tension has recently received considerable attention, the effect of interactions among auditory parameters on perceived tension has hardly been examined systematically. In this study, 132 participants (60 with music training) listened to short melodic sequences that combined manipulations of pitch direction, pitch register, loudness change, and tempo change, and rated in each sequence the overall tension level, as well as the direction of tension change (increasing or decreasing). For overall tension ratings, repeated measures ANOVAs showed main effects of loudness change, pitch direction, and pitch register (lower more tense), but not of tempo change. Importantly, several highly significant interactions among musical parameters (e.g., tempo and loudness, contour and loudness, tempo, contour, and register) were revealed. Tension change ratings were significantly affected by changes in loudness and tempo; register and contour elicited no main effect o...
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Experiments using diverse paradigms, including speeded discrimination, indicate that pitch and visually-perceived size interact perceptually, and that higher pitch is congruent with smaller size. While nearly all of these studies used... more
Experiments using diverse paradigms, including speeded discrimination, indicate that pitch and visually-perceived size interact perceptually, and that higher pitch is congruent with smaller size. While nearly all of these studies used static stimuli, here we examine the interaction of dynamic pitch and dynamic size, using Garner’s speeded discrimination paradigm. Experiment 1 examined the interaction of continuous rise/fall in pitch and increase/decrease in object size. Experiment 2 examined the interaction of static pitch and size (steady high/low pitches and large/small visual objects), using an identical procedure. Results indicate that static and dynamic auditory and visual stimuli interact in opposite ways. While for static stimuli (Experiment 2), higher pitch is congruent with smaller size (as suggested by earlier work), for dynamic stimuli (Experiment 1), ascending pitch is congruent with growing size, and descending pitch with shrinking size. In addition, while static stimul...
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Research Interests: Music, Perception, Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Speech perception, and 15 moreMusic Cognition, Figurative language, Speech, Cultural Differences, Humans, Cognitive Mapping, Female, Male, Listening, Pitch Perception, Language Culture and Communication, Task analysis, Cognitive processes, Adult, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion. In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with... more
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion. In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with imagined motions of a human character, and ...
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Background in music theory. Music theorists and aestheticians have long suggested that musical gestures are isomorphic with expressive motion (eg, Kurth, 1991; Scruton, 1997). The ramifications of this hypothesis can be observed in... more
Background in music theory. Music theorists and aestheticians have long suggested that musical gestures are isomorphic with expressive motion (eg, Kurth, 1991; Scruton, 1997). The ramifications of this hypothesis can be observed in attempts to map changes in diverse musical ...
Experiments using diverse paradigms, including speeded discrimination, indicate that pitch and visually-perceived size interact perceptually, and that higher pitch is congruent with smaller size. While nearly all of these studies used... more
Experiments using diverse paradigms, including speeded discrimination, indicate that pitch and visually-perceived size interact perceptually, and that higher pitch is congruent with smaller size. While nearly all of these studies used static stimuli, here we examine the interaction of dynamic pitch and dynamic size, using Garner’s speeded discrimination paradigm. Experiment 1 examined the interaction of continuous rise/fall in pitch and increase/decrease in object size. Experiment 2 examined the interaction of static pitch and size (steady high/low pitches and large/small visual objects), using an identical procedure. Results indicate that static and dynamic auditory and visual stimuli interact in opposite ways. While for static stimuli (Experiment 2), higher pitch is congruent with smaller size (as suggested by earlier work), for dynamic stimuli (Experiment 1), ascending pitch is congruent with growing size, and descending pitch with shrinking size. In addition, while static stimul...
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THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS AN empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion.1 In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with... more
THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS AN empirical investigation of the ways listeners associate changes in musical parameters with physical space and bodily motion.1 In the experiments reported, participants were asked to associate melodic stimuli with imagined motions of a human character and to specify the type, direction, and pacechange of these motions, as well as the forces affecting them. The stimuli consisted of pairs of brief figures, one member of a pair presenting an “intensification” in a specific musical parameter, the other an “abatement” (e.g., crescendo vs. diminuendo, accelerando vs. ritardando). Musical parameters manipulated included dynamics, pitch contour, pitch intervals, attack rate, and articulation. Results indicate that most musical parameters significantly affect several dimensions of motion imagery. For instance, pitch contour affected imagined motion along all three spatial axes (not only verticality), as well as velocity and “energy.” A surprising finding of this study is that musical-spatial analogies are often asymmetrical, as a musical change in one direction evokes a significantly stronger spatial analogy than its opposite. Such asymmetries include even the entrenched association of pitch change and spatial verticality, which applies mostly to pitch falls, but only weakly to rises. In general, musical abatements are strongly associated with spatial descents, while musical intensifications are generally associated with increasing speed rather than ascent. The implications of these results for notions of perceived musical space and foraccounts of expressive musical gesture are discussed.