An Information Processing Study of Individual Differences in Perception of Pitch Fluctuations in Music

Abstract

Although extreme individual differences in the music abilities of children have been celebrated from long before Mozart, satisfactory cognitive models of such precociousness have been less forthcoming. This research program employed an information processing model based on the neuropsychological work of Alexander Luria to investigate individual differences in the perception of pitch sequences with various degrees of structural coherence, with particular attention to children who appear to be musically gifted. The Luria model used in this study has three orthogonal dimensions of information processing: successive and simultaneous synthesis for encoding information, and executive synthesis which involves attentional and integrative processes. Psychometric operationalisations of the model have been used extensively in investigations of individual differences in mathematics and language performance of children at school. The model had not previously been applied to the domain of music. It was hypothesised that music perception involves the cooperative interaction of these three information processing dimensions. This research focussed on the perception of fluctuations in pitch - the attribute of music which is most strongly predictive of music ability. Evidence from studies in the cognitive sciences suggests that musical elements such as pitch are hierarchically chunked to form meaningful musical Gestalts. Other studies in psychophysics suggest that these cognitive processes may exploit the fractal or self-similar form of fluctuations in musical attributes. Fractional Brownian motion (fBm) tone series have proved a valuable tool in studies of perceptual responses to pitch fluctuations. To this end, the autocorrelation function is particularly salient.