The Relationship Between Pitch Discrimination and Fundamental Frequency Variation: Effects of Singing Status and...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between pitch discrimination and fundamental frequency (f_o) variation in running speech, with consideration of factors such as singing status and vocal hyperfunction (VH).

Female speakers (18-69 years) with typical voices (26 non-singers; 27 singers) and speakers with VH (22 non-singers; 30 singers) completed a pitch discrimination task and read the Rainbow Passage. The pitch discrimination task was a two-alternative forced choice procedure, in which participants determined whether tokens were the same or different. Tokens were a prerecorded sustained /ɑ/ of the participant's own voice and a pitch-shifted version of their sustained /ɑ/, such that the difference in f_o was adaptively modified. Pitch discrimination and Rainbow Passage f_o variation were calculated for each participant and compared via Pearson's correlations for each group.

A significant strong correlation was found between pitch discrimination and f_o variation for non-singers with typical voices. No significant correlations were found for the other three groups, with notable restrictions in the ranges of discrimination for both singer-groups and in the range of f_o variation values for non-singers with VH.

Speakers with worse pitch discrimination may increase their f_o variation to produce self-salient intonational changes, which is in contrast to previous findings from articulatory investigations. The erosion of this relationship in groups with singing training and/or with VH may be explained by the known influence of musical training on pitch discrimination or the biomechanical changes associated with VH restricting speakers' abilities to change their f_o.