MCG Reading: McPherson & McDermott 2023

This week for the Music Cognition Reading Group we read Relative pitch representations and invariance to timbre by Malinda McPherson and Josh McDermott.

Malinda has a great thread summarizing the paper here.

I personally really enjoyed reading in this literature recently for two reasons that come to mind right away.

1. This connects to some of the work we are interested in concerning mental representations of music at the music cognition group (see Research tab).
2. This type of empirical work feels very relevant to a lot of the music theory and aural skills literature concerning what it is humans are actually using to represent pitch.

If you want to see what I mean, check out the the sound examples from their paper that Malinda shared after reading the paper or her thread and play the examples where the second note is always 1 semitone higher than the first. You’ll hear, especially with the Incongruent/Inharmonic condition, a very cool sound that we felt exemplifies this perceptual spectral/pitch divorce.

The below is a screen shot of the link above, just to help direct you to what I am talking about.