Perception of monotic and dichotic harmonic musical intervals
Edward McN. Burns, W. Dixon Ward · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1976
A number of authors have made the assertion that musicians are unable to recognize harmonic intervals or chords when the component tones are presented dichotically and have cited experimental results to support this view. The results of a number of other experiments reported in the literature, however, contradict this assertion. In an attempt to clarify this issue, several highly trained musicians were tested in a forced-choice harmonic-musical-interval recognition paradigm. The component tones of the intervals were sinusoids and were presented either monotically or dichotically. The observers were able to recognize the dichotic intervals. In fact, for the condition of small intervals at low absolute frequencies, the observers achieved higher recognition performance in the dichotic mode than in the monotic mode. A more interesting result is that, for this situation, the observers obtained higher recognition performance for both monotic and dichotic presentation than would be predicted from the results of previous experiments in monotic and dichotic pitch fusion.