Along the lines of the concept of the inverted spectrum, can it be that musical pitch perception varies as well in an analogous fashion?

Question

Imagine hearing your favorite song from the point of view of a dog. Dogs perceive all sounds as being at a far lower pitch than we do. If you could hear what you sound like to a dog you'd find that you sound like a giant with a very deep and low-pitched voice.

There is a remarkable relationship between colors and notes in a musical scale. In music, doubling the frequency corresponding to a given note transposes the note up by an octave. If you double the frequency corresponding to a given musical pitch enough times you will have a frequency that corresponds to a color. That said, it's not that pitch and color are the same phenomenon at different scales but rather that there is an analogy present.

Take for example the note E_5=659.25Hz. Double this frequency over and over until the frequency is the same as a frequency of light corresponding to the color blue. Then take for example the note A_4=440Hz. Double this frequency over and over until the frequency is the same as a frequency of light corresponding to the color red-orange.

If it is indeed the case that musical pitch perception varies among individuals then there are of course some constraints as to how it might vary:

I assume that the ratios between the frequencies corresponding to musical notes is the same for everyone. That is, you and I would agree on the musical interval between between a note and the note that is a tritone above that note. We'd agree it's a tritone, but that only speaks to the ratio, so even though we're both claiming to hear the same song in A♭ it might be the case that if I were to step into your point of view it would actually sound to me like the song is in some key other than A♭.

As in, I think I'd still be able to jive to a song I like if I hear it from someone else's perspective because the musical intervals between every pair of of the notes in the song would still be the same. The intervals dictating how we perceive harmony would not vary from individual to individual.

If it were not the case that the musical interval between notes is the same for everyone, then we'd definitely know about it by now empirically. Some people would experience music drastically different from others and some people would be way off if you ask them to guess the interval between two notes

If what I call orange-red may very well be what you call blue and so on, can it likewise - analogously - be the case that what I call the musical pitch A_4=440Hz is what you call E_5=659.25Hz?

The lower and upper bounds on what frequencies you the reader can perceive as pitch are on average only going to be slightly different than my lower and upper bounds. While abiding by the constraint that we probably shouldn't be that different in that regard, can it nonetheless be that when I hear a song that you and I both agree is in the key of A Major and I prefer a cover of the song that you and I agree is in E Major where the singer has transposed their part up by seven semitones, there may be someone out there who hears the original song in what I would actually consider E Major?

That is, if I were able to step into your mind and hear a song which we both agree is in A Major, could the version that I'm hearing through your ears - metaphorically - sound like it's actually not at all what I would consider A Major.

It's a well-known phenomenon that as you increase the Hz from zero, the sound of a steady rhythmic pulse (beats evenly spaced in time) becomes the sound of some musical pitch. Likewise, if you speed up a repeating polyrhythm what you get eventually after having sped it up enough is actually just the sound of a chord.

If you take an extreme case, can a sound that one person perceives as a polyrhythm be at the same time perceived instead as a number of simultaneous pitches (a chord) by a different person? That seems like a rather extraordinary thing to think about.

Based on what I can understand it seems to me that the perception of pitch is a neat trick our brain performs when the brain chooses not to perceive a series of beats as individual beats but instead as a collective to which one can assign a so-called "pitch".

An illustrative consideration is what it's like to hear sounds as a dog. Things are appreciably lower pitched for them in their subjective experience of a given sound. You can imagine then that you can create a low-pitched enough song which to dogs would sound like a rhythmic ensemble rather than having a discernible melodic line or pitch at any point.

It's also worth pointing out that dogs experience the passage time at a faster rate than we do, by which I only mean that a minute feels much longer to them. That being the case, you can imagine that some very low pitched continuous note to which we humans would typically assign a pitch is heard by dogs instead as a series of evenly spaced beats, albeit a series of evenly spaces beats which all occur very close to one another in time

Consider a scenario in which you are recording audio of a singer singing a note. Now imagine that you use Audacity or some other software to slow down the audio by a great amount. The more you slow the audio down, the more clearly you will be able to hear a series of individual beats in rapid succession rather than one continuous, sustained note.

Answer 1

That question involves a lot of different domains with their own jargon around these things.

Physically it's not just a difference of frequencies between sound and light, but while both are waves, they are different kind of waves.

Sound waves are longitudinal pressure waves. Meaning the oscillation happens in the same direction that the wave is traveling in. So the wave pattern is a change between compression and decompression.

(this is supposed to be seen as a 2D image, nothing 3 dimensional happening, so the "peak" is just lines being closer together and the "valley" is lines being further apart, so that oscillation (change of peaks and valleys) happens in the same direction in which the wave is traveling).

While light is the usually much more intuitive concept of a transversal wave, meaning the direction in which the wave travels is perpendicular to it's oscillation. So think of standing at the beach and looking at the sea, then the waves come towards you (direction of travel), but the oscillation (the "wave pattern") is up and down, so perpendicular to the direction of motion.

Now I don't know how the biology of this works, but I'd assume that if you were played a sound of 400 THz (light red) on your headphones (might not be as easy to produce as it sounds anyway) you'd likely not feel a light red sensation or really anything because the change in compression/decompression happens so fast that you don't feel it as change at all. so you like won't hear, see or feel that at all.

However as the production of the sound might create a transversal wave pattern on the membrane of the "drum" you might be able to perceive that as colored.

So in order to for your brain to associate a frequency to a color or sound, you'd first need to perceive that and you're likely not going to be able to perceive a steady drum beat or pitch outside of the audible spectrum even if it enters the visible spectrum.

In terms of steady beat and pitch it's much easier. They are both longitudinal waves and a beat, while maybe associated with one event is already somewhat smeared out in time. So if you beat fast enough you're essentially doing the same thing as idk a string or tube of air oscillating. So that's not so much an illusion created by the brain, but the membrane in your ear is actually stimulated with a similar wave pattern. So from the perspective of the ear there is no difference between a fast rhythm and a single pitch. So both perceive that as polyrhythm/pitch.

That said just because you have the same input doesn't mean you have the same perception of that input, so yeah the association of a frequency signal with a sound/color in your brain could be different as it could just be a mapping that happens ever so slightly different for different people.

Now with regards to notes, pitches and intervals things can get even more complicated because that's a mix of physics and perception. Like what note corresponds to what frequency is more or less arbitrary and has changed over time. There are several ways to compute intervals from whole number fractions idk major third would be 5/4 of a tone, to equal temperament where you divide the octave into 12 steps of equal length, then there is a just noticable difference margin around frequencies which is not linear over the whole spectrum but increases with frequency. And then there is an emotional connection to certain sounds. Idk usually the advice to learn to identify intervals is to compare them to the start of common tunes, so if you associate idk a major third with happy birthday that might be more pleasant than a minor third associated with Jaws. On top of there already being a preference for certain intervals because the wave patterns are more similar or different.

So there is a lot of potential to hear different things with the same frequency. From perceiving the note itself differently, to being trained to the octave and thus intuitively correcting a note that is slightly off while people trained to a different scale might perform a different correction. To how these intervals are associated or what intervals are considered in the first place and whatnot. So there are a lot of things coming together and you should probably check physics and music to narrow down your focus.

Answer 2

Firstly, the relationship between colours and notes in music is not as remarkable as you suggest, being only weakly analogous at best. In our perception of light, there is nothing analogous to an octave, for example, nor is there the sensation of rising and falling pitch we associated with sound, or anything comparable to a chord in which we can still hear the individual tones while also experiencing their combined effect. However, as with light, the sensations we experience are a product of our minds, so it is possible that what you consider to be D is a sound that I consider not to be D, and vice versa. Even where you have two people with absolute pitch, it is still possible that they have different personal experiences of the same pitch.

Answer 3

Dogs perceive all sounds as being at a far lower pitch than we do. If you could hear what you sound like to a dog you'd find that you sound like a giant with a very deep and low-pitched voice.

I can find no evidence to support this claim. Without it, this entire question is based on a false premise and should be closed.

According to this article human sensitivity in the lower frequency range is equivalent or slightly better:

• human 64-23,000 Hz
• dog 67-45,000 Hz

According to your logic, a dog who hears a sound at 70Hz, perceives that sound at a much lower frequency than their ears can detect. That makes no sense.

Also, it's not possible to know what a dog perceives.

There is a difference between analog and digital sound. Just like a bitmap has finite resolution (magnify enough and individual square pixels emerge) digital audio has a sample limit. Slow down a digital recording until it reaches the sample limit and you will hear beats since the sample can't be divided any further.

The technique the drummer is using to create a tone is tremolo. And classical guitarists use this technique to create the illusion of a single long sustained note: Recuerdos de la Alhambra https://g.co/kgs/9cgjw3 The drummer is trying to get the drum head to resonate at its tuned frequency to produce the tone. This is very similar to the illusion of motion in movies where the frames per second needs to be high enough to give the illusion of motion.

Other percussion instruments using this technique are piano and marimba.