Poor-Pitch Singing in the Absence of "Tone Deafness"
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE TERM "TONE DEAFNESS," COMMONLY APPLIED TO poor-pitch singing, suggests that the cause lies in faulty perception. However, it is also plausible that problems lie in production, memory, and/or sensorimotor integration. We report the results of two experiments on vocal pitch imitation that addressed these possibilities. Participants listened to and then vocally imitated unfamiliar 4-note pitch sequences.Within each experiment, 10-15% of the participants imitated pitch at least one semitone off and were categorized as "poor-pitch singers." Such deviations were reliable across different pitch classes and therefore constitute transpositions. In addition, poor-pitch singers compressed the size of intervals during production. Poor-pitch singers did not differ from good singers in pitch discrimination accuracy, although they appeared to be hindered rather than helped by singing with correct accompaniment. Taken together, findings suggested that poor-pitch singing results from mismapping of pitch onto action, rather than problems specific to perceptual,motor, or memory systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it