Nature Vs Nurture

When I think about pitch the first things come to mind are instruments. This reminds me in middle school if you wanted to a part of the band, you got to test each instrument. I always had a fascinating with a flute, which had high a frequency and high pitch. Another instrument was a trombone; this had a low frequency and low pitch. This helped me understand the difference between pitches.

The temporal lobe is meant for processing sounds and dealing with almost everything hearing related. We believe this is possibly our most interactive exhibit with multiple activities designed to test and explore one’s hearing potential! Two activities include a hearing test and a pitch hearing test both of which are clearly interactive and enjoyable for both young and old

Have you ever wondered why our ears are shaped the way they are? The curves and dips in or ears help us receive the longitudinal waves in the air. After we hear a noise, the temporal lobe in our brain allows us to comprehend that sound.

The video covered three main topics. The first topic was how the brain processes music. The brain recognizes a melody as a pattern. Pitch is determined by the number of sound vibrations per second, and the tone color of the instrument being used determines the amount of harmonics. If several instruments are playing, the brain picks out each by separating the pitch of the melody. The eardrum vibrates differently for low and high notes; also, the cells at the base of the cochlea register low notes and the cells farther up perceive high.

Based on the results of auditory transcription of tone productions by participants of this study, the major confusion pattern among speakers with non-distinctive production was T5 produced as T2, which seemed to align with the acoustic analyses. The acoustic forms of T5 were found to approximate those of T2 in terms of F0 offset and amplitude rise time [see Fig. 2(a) and Table III]. For the ERP findings, early components were elicited in the T2/T5 condition from the permutation test for both groups, whereas an early component in the T5/T2 condition was observed only in the [+Pro+Per] group. These results are particularly interesting as temporal cues are generally recognized as secondary or concomitant to the primary cue of F0 in the literature of tone perception (Gandour, 1983; Khouw and Ciocca, 2007). In cognitive frameworks of auditory perception (Holt and Lotto, 2008, 2010), the speech signal encompasses a multitude of acoustic

In the article A study of cerebral action currents in the dog under sound stimulation, Perkins focuses on the functions of the cerebral cortex in relation to animal behavior. Perkins argues that animals such as dogs are not as sound blind as they might generally have been perceived. He goes on to say that current conceptions of brain function is incorrect and new techniques and methods need to be implemented. He completes multiple experiments on dogs to prove his argument. The main focus of the experiment is to show that animal’s cortical activity varies between different intensity and pitch. Perkins performed his experiment on nine dogs and 78 different records were produced from numerous locations of the gyri with varying sounds. And it is

When listening to music, some people experience a strong emotional reaction towards it with something that can be described as a tingling sensation running through the body (a.k.a.: “chills”). These “chills” are very distinct and clear, so they can be used in a scientific study involving music. In previous studies, researchers have found that there is activity in certain regions of the brain which relate to feelings caused by music that sounds jarring, or clashing tones of music. In the past, these regions of the brain have been found to relate to emotion. However, the regions of the brain related to musical dissonance were different when compared to the neocortical parts of the brain (which are known to be associated with how people recognize

They hypothesized that older musicians were more efficient and robust in neural encoding of speech in subcortical-cortical pathways and that the neural representations stemmed from it would be more organized categorically and coupled stronger to behavior than non-musicians. They used a variety of speech tests such as Behavioral speech identification, Brainstem ERPs to Speech and Cortical ERPs to speech to substantiate their claims. In their results and discussion, the authors confirmed their hypotheses that musicianship had indeed boosted speech-listening skills compared to non-musicians and that the auditory neuroplasticity was not exclusive by age. From these conclusions, they provided evidence that musicianship resists the slowing/decline of auditory processing by having neuroplasticity that is strong throughout

A summary of its pathway begins with sound waves entering the ear and vibrating the eardrum. Three tiny bones known as the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, are connected to the eardrum and convert the vibrations into a fluid filled organ that holds receptors for hearing called the cochlea. The vibrations are then transferred to hair cells, which are attached to neurons whose axons are arranged to form the auditory nerve. This pathway allows us to perceive sound waves to identify pitch through different types of frequencies. For instance, at low and high frequencies the hair cells in our ear vibrate causing a specific pitch. We distinguish pitch through intermediate frequencies by the result of cascaded responses from multiple neurons. To localize the source of sound, we distinguish differences in loudness using both ears, and we locate its distance based on the amount of reoccurring vibration after the main

The ear has several different mechanisms inside enabling the perception of sound from the environment. Bringing me to the next step of the perceptual process, neural processing. In this stage the receptors transmit signals via neurotransmitters through the auditory nerve and eventually into the brain. The cerebral cortex is responsible for turning the signals into my perception of the music.

These two theories are the place the place theory, developed by Hermann von Helmholtz and the frequency theory, also known as the frequency matching theory. Both of these theories involve the idea of hair cells being used to The place theory suggest that pitch is linked with the place where the cochlea’s membrane is stimulated. This theory also suggests that high frequencies produce high large vibrations at the beginning of the basilar membrane compared to lower frequencies which produce lower vibrations at the end of the basilar membrane. Through the use of the place theory when the dog barks the musician's hair cells in the ears would be stimulated at the oval window, assuming that the dog’s bark is high pitched, which is mostly the case for many dogs. However, if the dog’s bark had a lower pitch than the the hair cells near the top of the coil would be stimulated as it is to the end of the basilar membrane. Even though this theory is helpful in certain aspects it is highly inaccurate at making predictions. The major problem is that it can not explain how we hear low-pitched sounds, because the neural signals generated by low-pitched sounds are not so neatly localized on the basilar membrane. The frequency theory in hearing explains that the rate of nerve impulses traveling up the auditory nerve matches the frequency of the tone, thus enabling us to sense its pitch. Basically the frequency theory is stating that of 100 waves of sound per second, 100 pulses per second travel up the auditory nerve, which can explain who we perceive low-pitched sounds. Returning to the example of the dog and the musician, if the dog makes a low pitched growl than the sound waves will cause the entire basilar membrane to send neural impulses to the auditory nerve. However this theory has a fault in that an individual neuron cannot fire faster than 1000

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have been studying brain activity with advanced instruments like Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging or Position Emission Tomography .During these studies, participants are asked to do certain activities like reading, or doing math problems. Scientists have noticed that with each task that the participants do there is an area in the brain that corresponds to that activity. When researchers asked the participants to listen to music, they saw “Fireworks” or more than one part of the brain were lighting up at once while they process the sounds to identify the musical components like Melodies, rhythms and harmony and putting it back together to have a unified musical experience. After seeing the results

Some would argue that humans are intrinsically wired to produce music. As an infant, the sounds children make while learning language mimic the tonal shape of language. Parents also tend to use exaggerated highs and lows in their voices much like a simple melody to prepare and help develop the infant’s capacity to learn language. It has also been found that the neural networks used in language acquisition are very similar to those used in music acquisition (Mithen 2006). Language acquisition and development is imperative for an individual to survive, and if training the brain with music can strengthen those networks, this is a subject of great importance. Since the 1940s doctors have recognized the impacts of music on the behavior of patients with mental disabilities, and from this discovery, the effects of music on a regular developing brain became a subject of great interest. Researchers recognized that there was potentially an opportunity to increase brain development in children resulting in discernable enhancements of skills into adulthood (Reschke-Hernandez, 2011). It is now known that childhood music education improves skills required for playing music, namely motor functioning, auditory discrimination, and long and short term recall. These skills, learned through music instruction, transfer to non-musical skills such as verbal

In order to understand the relationship between music and cognitive processes, it is important to understand how music is perceived and processed in the brain. Musical perception and cognition are both actively constructed by the listener, as opposed to being passively transferred from the performer to the listener (Iyer, 159). There are three levels of musical perception: the raw psychophysical perception of tones, the perception of abstract qualities of tones apart from their source, and the apprehension of environmental objects that give rise to the sound events (Handel, 181). According to Stephen Handel, the first level of perception is when the listener first hears and perceives a musical stimulus such as melody, harmony, tonality, rhythm, meter, and form. The second level of musical perception is when the listener perceives abstract qualities of the musical stimuli. The final level of musical

To test their hypothesis, they first recorded VTA neurons of zebra finches while listening to distorted or undistorted songs (Gadagkar et al., 2016). They divided this experiment into two distorted conditions –one where the distorted feedback was one of the bird’s own, and another synthesized sound (Gadagkar et