The Roles of Absolute Pitch and Timbre in Plink Perception

Listeners can recognize musical excerpts less than one second in duration (plinks). We investigated the roles of timbre and implicit absolute pitch for plink identification, and the time course associated with processing these cues, by measuring listeners’ recognition, response time, and recall of original, mistuned, reversed, and temporally shuffled plinks that were extracted from popular song recordings. We hypothesized that performance would be best for the original plinks because their acoustic contents were encoded in long-term memory, but that listeners would also be able to identify the manipulated plinks by extracting dynamic and average spectral content. In accordance with our hypotheses, participants responded most rapidly and accurately for the original plinks, although notably, were capable of recognition and recall across all conditions. Our observation of plink recall in the shuffled condition suggests that temporal orderliness is not necessary for plink perception and instead provides evidence for the role of average spectral content. We interpret our results to suggest that listeners process acoustic absolute pitch and timbre information to identify plinks and we explore the implications for local and global acoustic feature processing.