Diana Deutsch - Deutsch's Musical Illusions / Tritone paradox 5/14/08 10:18 PM

Deutsch's Musical Illusions

Introduction Chromatic illusion

Technical Note Glissando illusion
Memory for pitch and music Tritone paradox
Octave illusion Mysterious melody
Scale illusion Cambiata illusion

Tritone paradox

The tritone paradox was first described by Deutsch at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (Deutsch, 1986)
and first published by Deutsch, Music Perception, 1986. The basic pattern that produces the this illusion consists of two
computer- produced tones that are related by a half-octave. (This interval is called a tritone). When one tone of a pair is played,
followed by the second, some people hear an ascending pattern. But other people, on listening to the identical pair of tones,
hear a descending pattern instead. This experience can be particularly astonishing to a group of musicians who are all quite
certain of their judgments, and yet disagree completely as to whether such a pair of tones is moving up or down in pitch.

The tritone paradox has another curious feature. In general, when a melody is played in one key, and it is then
transposed to a different key, the perceived relations between the tones are unchanged. The notion that a melody might change
shape when it is transposed from one key to another seems as paradoxical as the notion that a circle might turn into a square
when it is shifted to a different position in space.

But the tritone paradox violates this rule. When one of these tone pairs is played (such as C followed by F#) a listener
might hear a descending pattern. Yet when a different tone pair is played (such as G# followed by D), the same listener hears
an ascending pattern instead. (Another listener might hear the C-F# pattern as ascending and yet hear the G#-D pattern as
descending.)

The tones that are used to create the tritone paradox are so constructed that their note names (C, C#, D and so on) are
clearly defined, but they are ambiguous with respect to which octave they are in. For example, one tone might clearly be a C,
but in principle it could be middle C, or the C an octave above, or the C an octave below. This ambiguity is built into the tones
themselves. So when someone is asked to judge, for example, whether the pair of tones D-G# is ascending or descending in
pitch, there is literally no right or wrong answer. Whether the tones appear to move up or down in pitch depends entirely on the
mind of the listener. (Ambiguous tones such as these were used by others, particularly Roger Shepard and Jean-Claude
Risset, to create illusions of endlessly ascending or descending pitches.)

The way that any one listener hears the tritone paradox varies depending on the names of the notes that are played.
The musical scale is created by dividing the octave into twelve semitone steps, and each tone is given a name: C, C#, D, D#, E,
F, F#, G, G#, A, A# and B. The entire scale, as it ascends in height, consists of the repeating occurrence of this succession of
note names across octaves. So when you move up a piano keyboard in semitone steps beginning with C, you go first to C#,
then D, then D#, and so on, until you get to A#, then B, and then C again. At this point you have reached an octave, and you
begin all over, repeating the same series of note names in the next octave up the keyboard.

Because all Cs sound in some sense equivalent, as do all C#s, all Ds, and so on, we can think of pitch as varying both
along a simple dimension of height and also along a circular dimension of pitch class - a term that musicians use to describe
note names. So, for example, all Cs are in pitch class C, all C#s are in pitch class C#, and all Ds are in pitch class D.

Let us suppose that listeners mentally arrange pitch classes as a circular map, like a clockface. To explain different
listeners' perceptions of the tritone paradox, Deutsch conjectured that one person might orient his or her clockface so that C is
in the 12 o'clock position, C# is in the 1 o'clock position, and so on around the circle. This listener would tend to hear the pattern
C-F# (as well as B-F, and C#-G) as descending, and the pattern F#-C (as well as F-B and G-C#) as ascending. But another
person might orient is or her clockface so that F# is in the 12 o'clock position, G is in the 1 o'clock position, and so on. This
listener would instead tend to hear the pattern C-F# (as well as B-F, and C#-G) as ascending, and the pattern F#-C (as well as
F-B and G-C#) as descending. In other words, differences between listeners in perception of the tritone paradox could be due
to differences in the way they orient their maps of the pitch class circle.

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In one experiment, listeners were played many such pairs of tones, and they judged in each case whether they heard an
ascending or a descending pattern. Then the proportion of times that each listener heard a descending pattern was plotted as a
function of the pitch class of the first tone of the pair.

The results supported Deutsch’s conjecture - the judgments of most listeners varied systematically depending on the
positions of the tones along the pitch class circle: Tones in one region of the circle tended to be heard as higher, and tones in
the opposite region as lower.

In addition, the orientation of the pitch class circle varied strikingly from one listener to another. To illustrate these
differences, the judgments of two subjects are shown below. These subjects heard the tritone paradox in a very pronounced
fashion. The first subject clearly heard tone pairs C#-G, D-G#, D#-A and E-A# as ascending, but F#-C, G-C#, G#-D, A-D#,
A#-E, and B-F as descending. The second subject, in contrast, heard tone pairs B-F, C-F#, C#-G, D-G#, D#-A, and E-A# as
descending, and F#-C, G-C#, G#-D, and A-D# as ascending. So for the most part when the first subject heard an ascending
pattern the second subject heard a descending one, and vice versa. The upper part of the figure shows the two orientations of
the pitch class circle with respect to height which were derived from the judgments of these subjects. For the first subject, pitch
classes G# and A stood at the top of the circle, but for the second subject, C# and D stood in this position instead. To further
illustrate the differences between listeners in perception of the tritone paradox, the judgments of four more subjects are shown
below.

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Another surprising consequence of the tritone paradox concerns absolute pitch - the ability to name a note just from
hearing it. This faculty is generally considered to be very rare. But the tritone paradox shows that the large majority of people in
fact possess a form of absolute pitch, since we hear tones as higher or as lower depending simply on their pitch classes, or
note names.

Why do people orient their maps of the pitch class circle in different ways? Deutsch conjectured that the answer might
lie in the speech patterns that we hear. When people from other countries visited her laboratory in California, they often heard
this pattern differently from native Californians. And when the effect was demonstrated to audiences in other countries and they
were asked to indicate their judgments with a show of hands, audiences appeared to differ from each other in what they
heard.

So on the basis of these observations, Deutsch (1991) compared two groups of subjects. Those in the first group had
grown up in California, and those in the second group had grown up in the south of England. These two groups tended to differ
in how they heard the tritone paradox: Frequently when a Californian subject heard a pattern as ascending, a subject from the
south of England heard the identical pattern as descending, and vice versa.

In another study, Deutsch, North, and Ray, 1990, obtained a significant correspondence between the pitch range of a
person's speaking voice and how he or she perceived this pattern. This study provided a further indication that speech patterns
influence the the way the tritone paradox is heard.

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Other studies have uncovered regional differences within the United States and Canada in the perception of the tritone
paradox (Ragozzine and Deutsch, 1994; Treptoe, 1997, Giangrande, 1998, Dawe, Platt and Walsh 1998; Chalikia, 1999, 2000
. Because there are regional dialects within the United States, it seems that speech patterns are likely to lie at the root of these
differences also. It even appears that the way a person hears the tritone paradox is related, not only to the geographical region
in which he or she grew up, but also to the regions in which his or her parents grew up (Ragozzine and Deutsch, 1994;
Deutsch, 1996; Deutsch, Henthorn, and Dolson, 2000). So it seems that the speech to which we were exposed as children
influence the way we hear the tritone paradox as adults. In addition, people who have spent considerable time in more than
one geographical region sometimes produce mixed results. For example, their plots may have two peaks, reflecting their
exposure to different languages or dialects.

The signals for a full experiment on Deutsch's Tritone Paradox are published in the compact disc 'Musical Illusions and
Paradoxes.'

Tritone paradox example

References:

Deutsch, D. A musical paradox. Music Perception, 1986, 3, 275-280. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. An auditory paradox. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1986, 80, s93. [Web Link]

Deutsch, D., Kuyper, W. L. and Fisher, Y. The tritone paradox: Its presence and form of distribution in a general population.
Music Perception, 1987, 5, 79-92. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: Effects of spectral variables. Perception & Psychophysics, 1987, 41, 563-575.
[PDF Document]

Deutsch, D., North, T. and Ray, L. The tritone paradox: Correlate with the listener's vocal range for speech. Music Perception,
1990, 7, 371-384. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: An influence of language on music perception. Music Perception, 1991, 8, 335-347.
[PDF Document]

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Diana Deutsch - Deutsch's Musical Illusions / Tritone paradox 5/14/08 10:18 PM

Deutsch, D. Paradoxes of musical pitch. Scientific American, 1992, 267, 88-95. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. Some new pitch paradoxes and their implications. In Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds. Philosphical
Transactions of the Royal Society, Series B, 1992, 336, 391-397. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: Implications for the representation and communication of In M. R. Jones and S. Holleran
(Eds.). Cognitive bases of musical communication, 1992, American Psychological Association Monog, 115-138.

Ragozzine, F., & Deutsch, D. A regional difference within the United States in perception of the tritone paradox. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 1993, 94, 1860. [Web Link]

Ragozzine, F. and Deutsch, D. A regional difference in perception of the tritone paradox within the United States. Music
Perception, 1994, 12, 213-225. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: Some further geographical correlates. Music Perception, 1994, 12, 125-136. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. Mothers and their children hear a musical illusion in strikingly similar ways. Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America, 1996, 99, 2482. [Web Link] [Laylanguage version]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: A link between music and speech. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1997, 174-
180. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. The tritone paradox: A link between music and speech. Invited paper. Workshop on Language and Music
Processing, 1997, Marseilles

Giangrande, J. The tritone paradox: Effects of pitch class and position of the spectral envelope. Music Perception, 1998, 13,
253-264.

Dawe, L. A., Platt, J. R. and Welsh, E. Spectral-motion after-effects and the tritone paradox among Canadian subjects.
Perception and Psychophysics, 1998, 60, 209-220.

Deutsch, D., Henthorn T. and Dolson, M. Speech patterns heard early in life influence later perception of the tritone paradox.
Music Perception, 2004, 21, 357-372. [PDF Document]

Deutsch, D. Mothers and their offspring perceive the tritone paradox in closely similar ways. Archives of Acoustics, 2007, 32, 3-
14. [PDF Document]

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