Excited to kick off 2025 with new research in #MachineLearning, #Decoding, #MusicNeuroscience! Our paper, “Temporally Dissociable Neural Representations of Pitch Height and Chroma”, now in @sfnjournals.bsky.social doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @xiangbin-teng.bsky.social! 🧠🎵 1/n - ThreadSky

candrew123.bsky.social • 9 days ago

Excited to kick off 2025 with new research in #MachineLearning, #Decoding, #MusicNeuroscience! Our paper, “Temporally Dissociable Neural Representations of Pitch Height and Chroma”, now in
@sfnjournals.bsky.social
https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1567-24.2024
@davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @xiangbin-teng.bsky.social! 🧠🎵 1/n

Comments

cedricboeckx.bsky.social•7 days ago

Very neat work!

rhamdu.bsky.social•7 days ago

So... neurophysiological evidence for the concept of chroma 🌈👂
My reading on pitch perception is far from complete (e.g. the Révész ref is new to me, tnx) but I lean to the view that chroma (octave equivalence) is learned until I see good evidence of an innate component.

rhamdu.bsky.social•7 days ago

If chroma IS learned, we must ask whether it is acquired from natural sounds or from music (making it a cultural phenomenon). If from natural harmonic sounds, then we need to explain why pitches are categorised by 2f equivalence, and how strongly 3f, 4f, 5f... equivalence are experienced 🤔

candrew123.bsky.social•7 days ago

There is an excellent cross-cultural study on this topic by @norijacoby.bsky.social. A lay summary of the paper can be found here: https://www.aesthetics.mpg.de/en/research/research-group-computational-auditory-perception/news/news-rg-cap-detail/article/perception-of-pitch-is-culturally-influenced-1.html

candrew123.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thanks for your comment. Yes there are several recent studies suggesting that chroma is not really an innate or universal property of pitch perception. Our study cannot answer this question, but we indeed found that the effect of chroma is much weaker than height.

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

Why does pitch matter? It’s essential not just for music, but for speech perception & sound segregation too! Understanding how our brain dynamically encodes pitch is a major research in auditory cognitive neuroscience. 2/n

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

We used machine learning to decode how the brain represents musical pitches during an #MEG scan. Our model reconstructed how the brain represents the similarity between different pitches and how this representation changes over time. 3/n

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

This animation shows the reconstruction of how the brain dynamically represents musical pitches. The pitches that are closer in space are perceived as more similar at a given moment. 4/n

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

The brain doesn’t process pitch in an unstructured way. Typically, it represents pitches in a mostly linear structure—think piano keyboard layout. BUT—just 0.3 seconds after hearing a sound, something wild happens: the brain briefly represents pitch in a helix-like structure! 5/n

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

The helix model reflects the idea that pitches separated by an octave (e.g., the repeating piano keys) are perceived as inherently similar. This concept was first explored in the early 1900s by Géza Révész, laying the groundwork for modern music cognition! 🧠🎹 6/n

candrew123.bsky.social•9 days ago

In short: By combining machine learning and MEG, we show how the brain’s dynamic pitch representation echoes ideas proposed over 100 years ago. Feels like completing a full circle in music cognitive neuroscience! Huge thanks to my collaborators! End/n

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