Discrimination of musical intervals by humans and chickadees: Cue salience modulated by timbre
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Abstract
Musical consonance/dissonance, roughly defined by its characteristic stability/instability, has been shown to be a relatively salient feature of sound. The extent to which the salience of this property varies as a function of timbre, a property that distinguishes two sounds of the same pitch and loudness, is currently unknown. A Go/No Go operant task was employed to test how humans (Experiment 1) and black-capped chickadees (Experiment 2) discriminate synthetic and piano musical intervals of varying consonance/dissonance. Humans that discriminated synthetic intervals had proportionally higher error rates for intervals where the upper notes were close in pitch whereas humans that discriminated piano stimuli had more errors to stimuli related by consonance. Chickadees showed a similar trend for synthetic intervals but not for piano intervals. Taken together, these findings suggest that timbre modulates the salience of consonance/dissonance for auditory discrimination tasks but that the relative salience varies across species.