In human cultures, the perceptual categorization of musical pitches relies on pitch-naming systems. A sung pitch name concurrently holds the information of fundamental frequency and pitch name. These two aspects may be either congruent or incongruent with regard to pitch categorization. The present study aimed to compare the neuromagnetic responses to musical and verbal stimuli for congruency j...

Musical pitch identification was investigated in two experiments in which absolute pitch (AP) possessors and nonpossessors categorized tones presented in isolation into predetermined pitch classes. Stimuli consisted of 60 different tones per octave (at intervals of 20 cents). The experiments were designed to minimize the possibility that subjects could use strategies other than AP in perfi~rmin...

Melodies, speech, and other stimuli that vary in pitch are processed largely in terms of the relative pitch differences between sounds. Relative representations permit recognition of pitch patterns despite variations in overall pitch level between instruments or speakers. A key component of relative pitch is the sequence of pitch increases and decreases from note to note, known as the melodic c...

This paper presents a phonetic analysis of pitch range as perceived and measured on utterance and syllable level. A previous analysis of read speech showed that German speakers produced a larger pitch-range on utterance level, whereas Swiss German speakers produced a larger pitch-range on syllable level. This analysis was based on the production of broadcasters reading news messages and a fairy...

Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English) also show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 18 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically encode p...

Relative pitch is the ability to identify intervals between pitches, whereas absolute pitch is the less common ability to identify and reproduce musical pitches without reference to other pitches. This study utilized an auditory-visual Stroop test to investigate the automaticity of absolute and relative pitch. Absolute and relative pitch possessors simultaneously heard a piano tone and viewed a...

This paper proposes an algorithm to estimate the melody pitch line (the most dominant pitch sequence) of a given polyphonic audio based on melody range estimation and pitch candidate extraction using a harmonic structure model similar to that proposed by Goto. This paper defines melody pitch candidate as a list of pitch candidates that produces the best-fit harmonic models to the polyphonic aud...

The pitch-marking algorithm presented in this paper avoids inconsistency errors between pitch markers in subsequent fundamental periods by adding the requirements of waveform and pitch consistency. The approach is as follows. Candidate pitch markers satisfying user-defined properties for pitch marking are selected first. Dynamic programming is then used to find the sequence of candidate pitch m...

In order to transform the perceived speaker identity, a voice conversion system should, a.o., convert the speaker’s prosodic characteristics. When considering pitch contours, most systems only transform the pitch by simple scaling. A stochastic system that transforms pitch contours taking into account multiple pitch parameters has been developed and is described. A pitch transplantation system ...