Pitch-matching scanning: comparison of musicians and non-musicians' performance.

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a simple and quick-to-apply procedure for pitch-matching scanning that contains vocal imitation tasks of musical sounds of different tones and the temporal ordination of three different tones; to verify its applicability, by comparing the performance of musicians and non-musicians.

Methods: Participants were 32 adults of both genders without vocal, hearing and/or auditory processing complaints. They were equally divided into two groups: musicians group--MG and non-musicians group--NMG. All participants underwent the Pitch-matching Scanning that included musical stimuli compatible with men and women singing vocal range gathered into two types of tasks: isolate tones and three-tone sequences. Participants were instructed to listen to them and to reproduce them vocally. Voice samples were recorded, analyzed acoustically, and right and wrong matches for the two tasks were characterized. The variables regarding the comparison between groups and types of tasks were statistically analyzed.

Results: A difference was found between groups, and the MG presented greater number of right matches in both tasks.

Conclusion: The Pitch-matching Scanning was developed and was sensitive to evaluate and compare the performance between groups. Thus, it can be used as a tool for pitch-matching tracking. Musicians presented better performance than non-musicians in the Pitch-matching Scanning.