Research

Pitch and Timbre Perception Across Species

Description

Humans can identify a melody (pitch) whether it's played by a piano or violin (timbre). This separation of pitch and timbre that depends on attention to the harmonic series may be an unusual phenomenon in the animal kingdom and may be important for our perception and production of music. This project aims to compare pitch and timbre perception across species in order to get a clearer picture of the evolution of music in humans.

Cooperation Partners

  • Jason Yee, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria
  • Juan Manuel Toro, University of Pompeu Fabra, Spain
  • Henkjan Honing, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Michelle Spierings, Leiden University, Netherlands
  • Chris Sturdy, University of Alberta, Canada
We proposed 4 human traits underlie our perception of pitch and timbre. We humans have especially clear harmonic, or overtone, information in our vocalizations. We sometimes imitate only parts of this harmonic information when we are vocally learning and imitating words and songs as children. The reason we do this is because we have different vocal ranges: children have higher pitched voices than adults, especially adult males, and sometimes it is impossible to imitate the same note. Adult men and women also tend to have different vocal ranges, especially when singing. We also often sing at the same time. We believe that making sure our harmonic information matches in all these cases has led us to create scales in music that rely on the structure of the harmonic series. Because other animal vocalizations also have harmonic information, this information may not be uniquely used by humans. By studying animals that share some of these human traits we can begin to understand what drives our species towards harmonic sounds. Image in: Wagner, B., & Hoeschele, M. (2022). The links between pitch, timbre, musicality and social bonding from cross-species research. Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, 17, 13–32.

Team