Going "sideways" in pitch

Dave Keenan [TD 73]:

> Yesterday, a friend . . . asked, "All musicians ever
> do is go up or down in pitch, right?" I cautiously
> replied, "Rrrriiight?", at the same time wondering
> if he'd forgotten to take his medication that morning. :-)
> "So?"
>
> "If these musicians are so hot, how come they
> never go *sideways*?"

In addition to the ideas you posted on this, I thought
of the following.

The two basic perceptions we seem to have in
understanding musical pitch are what I've called
"pitch-height" and "chroma". Pitch-height is the more
obvious one, which is simply our perception of a
tone as being at a particular place somewhere
in the audible pitch-continuum, because of the
particular cochlear hairs that are stimulated by that
frequency. This is quite obviously and literally
"up or down in pitch".

Chroma is our perception of pitch based on periodicity
of neural firing. In my opinion and theories, this
involves primarily prime-factoring of the frequency
ratios (perhaps others would admit just odd-factoring).
So in a way, this is a kind of "sideways in pitch".

- Monzo
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html

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Joseph L Monzo <monz@juno.com> wrote:

>Chroma is our perception of pitch based on periodicity
>of neural firing. In my opinion and theories, this
>involves primarily prime-factoring of the frequency
>ratios (perhaps others would admit just odd-factoring).
>So in a way, this is a kind of "sideways in pitch".

I don't follow. Please describe if you can, (how to generate?) two sounds that have the same pitch-height but slightly different, and then very different, "chroma".

I don't think neurons can fire fast enough to keep up. Time in the audio signal doesn't need to be (and is very unlikely to be) represented as time in the brain. Also note that there is no need for the brain to compute prime factorisations (again very unlikely) in order for primes to have auditory significance.

Regards,
-- Dave Keenan
http://dkeenan.com

Dave Keenan wrote,

>I don't think neurons can fire fast enough to keep up. Time in the
audio signal doesn't need to be (and is very >unlikely to be)
represented as time in the brain.

Yes, but it is! For the lower part of the audio spectrum only. Read up
on your psychoacoustics (I recommend Roederer highly).