2025/01/10 by Andrew Chang, David Poeppel, Xiangbin Teng · 1 voice · 4 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Auditory cortex #Auditory perception #Computer science #Decoding methods #Electroencephalography #Hearing Loss and Rehabilitation #Magnetoencephalography #Neural dynamics and brain function #Neurophysiology #Neuroscience #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Perception #Pitch (Music) #Psychoacoustics #Psychology #Speech recognition
paper · open access · doi:10.1523/jneurosci.1567-24.2024
published in Journal of Neuroscience 45(8), e1567242024 (Society for Neuroscience)
openalex publication_date 2025/01/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
The extraction and analysis of pitch underpin speech and music recognition, sound segregation, and other auditory tasks. Perceptually, pitch can be represented as a helix composed of two factors: height monotonically aligns with frequency, while chroma cyclically repeats at doubled frequencies. Although the early perceptual and neurophysiological mechanisms for extracting pitch from acoustic signals have been extensively investigated, the equally essential subsequent stages that bridge to high-level auditory cognition remain less well understood. How does the brain represent perceptual attributes of pitch at higher-order processing stages, and how are the neural representations formed over time? We used a machine learning approach to decode time-resolved neural responses of human listeners (10 females and 7 males) measured by magnetoencephalography across different pitches, hypothesizing that different pitches sharing similar neural representations would result in reduced decoding performance. We show that pitch can be decoded from lower-frequency neural responses within auditory-frontal cortical regions. Specifically, linear mixed-effects modeling reveals that height and chroma explain the decoding performance of delta band (0.5-4 Hz) neural activity at distinct latencies: a long-lasting height effect precedes a transient chroma effect, followed by a recurrence of height after chroma, indicating sequential processing stages associated with unique perceptual and neural characteristics. Furthermore, the localization analyses of the decoder demonstrate that height and chroma are associated with overlapping cortical regions, with differences observed in the right orbital and polar frontal cortex. The data provide a perspective motivating new hypotheses on the mechanisms of pitch representation.