Facing pitch: Constructing associations between space and pitch leads to better estimation of musical intervals

Abstract

Mental-spatial representations are often used for processing quantities and magnitudes such as numbers or pitch. The present study investigates whether the active creation of associations between space and pitch magnitude leads to a better estimation of the distances between pitches (musical intervals). Non-musicians performed an aurally presented comparison task in which musical intervals had to be estimated both before and after a training phase. Experiment 1 shows that the experimental group participants who were given the opportunity to establish associations between space and pitch (by means of spatial visualizations presented during training) improved significantly regarding their skill of estimating musical intervals compared with a control group without exposure to spatial visualizations during training. Experiment 2 replicated these findings, and a supplementary experimental group showed that the establishment of these associations is hindered when, additionally to pitch, task-irrelevant information about the point in time at which a tone is played during a trial, is also presented spatially during training (which does not decrease performance in training). We found that explicitly creating associations between space and pitch leads to a better estimation of the size of musical intervals, and we conclude that using analogies between space and pitch, e.g., in aural training in music education, is an efficient way to train the perception of pitch distances between musical notes.