Topic: tempo

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-t

Nightingales are renowned for their large song repertoire, including the acoustically distinct type of so-called whistle songs. These contain temporal sequences of unmodulated tonal syllables, known as whistle syllables, defining the fundamental frequency of the song, i.e., the pitch. While recent research has shown nightingales’ ability to adjust acoustic structure to match pitch, the flexibility of their temporal structure remains unexplored. Here, we show that nightingales exhibit a consistent rhythmic pattern in their whistle songs, with a shift in pitch distribution toward lower frequenci