Pitch and Time Interact in Auditory Perception

Research into pitch perception and time perception has typically treated the two as independent processes. However, previous studies of music and speech perception have suggested that pitch and timing information may be processed in an integrated manner, such that the pitch of an auditory stimulus can influence a person’s perception, expectation, and memory of its duration and tempo. Typically, higher-pitched sounds are perceived as faster and longer in duration than lower-pitched sounds with identical timing. We conducted a series of experiments to better understand the limits of this pitch-time integrality. Across several experiments, we tested whether the higher-equals-faster illusion generalizes across the broader frequency range of human hearing by asking participants to compare the tempo of a repeating tone played in one of six octaves to a metronomic standard. When participants heard tones from all six octaves, we consistently found an inverted U-shaped effect of the tone’s pitch height, such that perceived tempo peaked between A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) and decreased at lower and higher octaves. However, we found that the decrease in perceived tempo at extremely high octaves could be abolished by exposing participants to high-pitched tones only, suggesting that pitch-induced timing biases are context sensitive. We additionally tested how the timing of an auditory stimulus influences the perception of its pitch, using a pitch discrimination task in which probe tones occurred early, late, or on the beat within a rhythmic context. Probe timing strongly biased participants to rate later tones as lower in pitch than earlier tones. Together, these results suggest that pitch and time exert a bidirectional influence on one another, providing evidence for integrated processing of pitch and timing information in auditory perception. Identifying the mechanisms behind this pitch-time interaction will be critical for integrating current models of pitch and tempo processing.