On the Tonal Dependence of Auditory Rhythmic Discrimination
Pierre L. Divenyi · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1971
Triplets of short tones, “micro-melodies,” were constructed by using sinusoidal pulses of frequencies f1−f1−f2, embedded in continuous broad-band white noise. Duration of the pulses was 100 msec. Their rise and fall times were, respectively, 10 and 20 msec. Pulses were either evenly spaced in time (i.e., leading edges of contiguous pulses were 300 msec apart) or a delay of some Δt was introduced before the third pulse. In a YES-NO-type signal-detection experiment where musical subjects were used, it was found that discriminability of a given delay was lower when (1) the separation between the two frequencies was small, (2) a given frequency pair outlined an ascending rather than a descending melodic interval, (3) the two frequencies were low-order contiguous harmonics of some common fundamental, or (4) the frequency pair belonged to a set of higher (675–1350 Hz) rather than to a set of lower (215–500 Hz) frequencies.