Auditory Imagery

Imagined Pitch and Imagined Duration

Research on auditory imagery has taken several different paths. One line of research has sought to confirm the subjective sense that auditory images do directly represent a sound's pitch. One series of experiments, for example, asked participants to imagine a specific pitch, and then to detect a faint tone either of the same pitch or different. Participants' performance was better when the tone they were trying to detect was the same pitch as the one they were imagining—suggesting both that the image had accurately represented the pitch and that this imagined pitch primed the processes of actual hearing. A different series of experiments asked participants to imagine a particular melody and then to hum the starting pitch of the melody they were thinking about. Two days later, participants returned to the lab and did the same task. Across this two-day interval, the data show remarkable consistency in the pitch that each participant hummed for each song—indicating both that participants imagined the song at a specific pitch and that they were consistent in the pitch they chose for each melody.

A different line of research confirms the subjective sense that images are stretched out in time in just the way actual sounds are. In one study, participants were given specific words from a song's lyrics (for example, can and by from “The Star-Spangled Banner”), and had to judge whether the pitch of the note accompanying the second word (by, the seventh beat of the phrase) was higher or lower than the pitch of the note accompanying the first word (in this case, the third beat). The data showed that the time needed to make this judgment increased in a regular fashion if the first note was further from the song's start, and also if the second note was further from the first. It would seem, then, that participants perform this task by “playing” the melody “in their heads,” starting with the melody's actual start—and the more notes they have to “play” to make their judgment, the more time needed.

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