Psychoacoustics
Discover how our individual perception shapes our view of the world. Using advanced tests, we explore the unique aspects of your auditory perception, far beyond the standard audiogram.
When individuals see or hear something, they usually assume that others perceive the same thing under the same conditions. This fundamental assumption is rarely questioned in everyday life. However, cognitive psychology teaches us that perception is largely based on interpretation. This is because the brain does not merely receive sensory information similarly to a camera or audio recorder and reproduce it; rather, it primarily constructs meaningful contexts that allow for appropriate responses to changes in our environment. Thus, there is a constant interplay between bottom-up processes (stimuli transmitted from the sensory organs to the brain) and top-down processes (filtering and interpretation of sensory impressions according to existing expectations). Since the latter are shaped by experience and learning, identical stimuli can lead to individually different perceptions, sensations, and evaluations.
Furthermore, certain aspects of the sensory information received are processed in specific neural networks in the brain. The relative dominance of such networks over others can vary from person to person. As a result, some individuals clearly perceive and remember certain sensory impressions, while others hardly do. For example, the same visual scene may be primarily imagined in terms of color, brightness, contours, or movement, and this can be artistically expressed. The same applies to auditory perception. Not only do people's tastes in music sometimes differ considerably, even individual sounds are perceived differently based on their qualities.
In our research, we develop tests to create precise auditory perceptual profiles. In contrast to peripheral hearing, which is usually measured with an audiogram in the ENT field, this involves various dimensions of subjective auditory pattern recognition at the brain level.
Auditory tests developed by us
Most musical sounds exhibit harmonic spectra, characterized by a fundamental frequency and its integer multiples (overtones). The fundamental frequency is essential for recognizing the pitch of an instrument or the human voice, while the presence of specific overtones is crucial for identifying sound details and the characteristic timbre. The human auditory system can perceive an actual or missing fundamental frequency within a sound spectrum and can even fill in the absent fundamental. Additionally, it can consciously perceive the present overtones by directing attention to them. The former ability ("abstract hearing") is primarily a function of the left hemisphere of the brain, while the latter ("concrete hearing") is primarily a function of the right hemisphere.
The AmbiQ test battery, developed in collaboration with the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Dr. Martin Lindenbeck) in 2023, includes two complementary tests to determine the individual characteristics of fundamental and spectral pitch perception:
- Auditory Ambiguity Test (first version: Seither-Preisler et al., 2007)
- Pitch Perception Preference Test (first version: Schneider et al., 2005 a)
Measuring the ability to discriminate:
- Pitch (cent)
- Duration (ms)
- Onset (ms)
- Loudness (dB)
- Rhythm
(Schneider & Seither-Preisler, 2022, 2023)
Absolute pitch is the ability to identify the pitch of a heard tone without a reference, such as C♯, B♭, or F♯, i.e., the "chroma," without considering the octave. In Western cultures, absolute pitch is extremely rare among non-musicians (~1 in 10,000), whereas it is relatively common among professional musicians (~1 in 10). In Asian countries, the ability is significantly more widespread, which is attributed to the phonetic importance of pitch contours in tonal languages and the prevalence of early music education. Our test for absolute pitch is the only procedure to date that assesses the gradual manifestation of this ability.
(Wengenroth & Schneider, 2014)
Relative pitch enables the recognition of relationships between the pitches of successive tones. While, in principle, this ability is universal and forms the basis for recognizing melodies in different registers (e.g., when "Happy Birthday" is sung by a high-pitched child's voice or a deep male voice), the ability to correctly name the musical intervals within a melody is a skill acquired through musical practice. However, this ability also varies depending on individual musical competence.
(Benner & Schneider, 2019, 2023)
In this test, the ability to remember individual words from unfamiliar languages based on their phonetic properties and to recognize them within spoken sentences is assessed. The focus is on the individual's capacity to perceive the musical quality of language. The Speech Perception Test is part of an extensive test battery developed by our colleague Dr. Markus Christiner, designed to evaluate language competence and aptitude. The development of this test is supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (initially as part of a DOC-Team Project, currently as APART Project).
(Christiner, 2021, 2022 a,b)
Psychoacoustic research topics
In our research, we address the question of whether individual auditory perception profiles can be better explained by stable neurological dispositions (aptitude) or neuroplasticity (learning experience). So far, we have found evidence for both aspects and a dynamic interplay of constitutional and environmental factors (Schneider et al., 2023).
Our AMseL long-term study showed that the discrimination of elementary sound characteristics (frequency, loudness, tone onset, tone duration) and rhythms improves continuously from childhood to young adulthood, with active music-making exerting a positive influence.
Our findings on fundamental or overtone hearing show that the individual hearing mode depends both on the relative volumes and activations in the right and left hemispheres of the brain (Schneider et al., 2005) and on previous musical experience (Seither-Preisler et al., 2007; Schneider at al., 2023). Musicians were also found to have a systematic correlation with the preference for certain musical instruments (Schneider et al., 2005 b). With regard to the ability of absolute pitch, a right-hemispheric neural network was identified for the first time, which represents the immediate sensory experience, as well as a co-activation of Broca's area, which performs the "labeling" of the perceived pitches in musical pitch categories (Wengenroth & Schneider, 2014).
In addition to the self-developed tests mentioned above, other methods developed by international test developers are also used in research and teaching:
References
Benner, J., Reinhardt, J., Christiner, M., Wengenroth, M., Stippich, C., Schneider, P., & Blatow, M. (2023). Temporal hierarchy of cortical responses reflects core-belt-parabelt organization of auditory cortex in musicians. Cerebral Cortex, 33(11), 7044-7060. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhad020
Schneider, P., Engelmann, D., Groß, C., Bernhofs, V., Hofmann, E., Christiner, M., Zeidler, B., […] & Seither-Preisler, A. (2023). Neuroanatomical disposition, natural development, and training-induced plasticity of the human auditory system from childhood to adulthood: a 12-year study in musicians and nonmusicians. Journal of Neuroscience, 43(37), 6430-6446.
Christiner, M., Renner, J., Groß, C., Seither-Preisler, A., Benner, J., & Schneider, P. (2022 a). Singing Mandarin? What short-term memory capacity, basic auditory skills, and musical and singing abilities reveal about learning Mandarin. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 895063. https://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.895063
Christiner, M., Serrallach, B. L., Benner, J., Bernhofs, V., Schneider, P., Renner, J., […] & Groß, C. (2022 b). Examining individual differences in singing, musical and tone language ability in adolescents and young adults with dyslexia. Brain Sciences, 12(6), 744. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/brainsci12060744
Schneider, P., Groß, C., Bernhofs, V., Christiner, M., Benner, J., Turker, S., […] & Seither‐Preisler, A. (2022). Short‐term plasticity of neuro‐auditory processing induced by musical active listening training. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1517(1), 176-190. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14899
Christiner, M., Gross, C., Seither-Preisler, A., & Schneider, P. (2021). The melody of speech: what the melodic perception of speech reveals about language performance and musical abilities. Languages, 6(3), 132. https://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages6030132
Benner, J., & Schneider, P. (2019). Das innere Ohr. Absolutes und relatives Gehör. Ruperto Carola, 14, 36-43. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.ruca.2019.14.23972
Wengenroth, M., Blatow, M., Heinecke, A., Reinhardt, J., Stippich, C., Hofmann, E., & Schneider, P. (2014). Increased volume and function of right auditory cortex as a marker for absolute pitch. Cerebral Cortex, 24(5), 1127-1137. https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhs391
Seither-Preisler, A., Johnson, L., Krumbholz, K., Nobbe, A., Patterson, R., Seither, S., & Lütkenhöner, B. (2007). Tone sequences with conflicting fundamental pitch and timbre changes are heard differently by musicians and nonmusicians. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33(3), 743. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.33.3.743
Schneider, P., Sluming, V., Roberts, N., Scherg, M., Goebel, R., Specht, H. J., […] & Rupp, A. (2005 a). Structural and functional asymmetry of lateral Heschl's gyrus reflects pitch perception preference. Nature Neuroscience, 8(9), 1241-1247. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1530
Schneider, P., Sluming, V., Roberts, N., Bleeck, S., & Rupp, A. (2005 b). Structural, functional, and perceptual differences in Heschl's gyrus and musical instrument preference. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060(1), 387-394. https://dx.doi.org/10.1196/annals.1360.033