Vocal Trill and Glissando Thresholds for Indian Listeners

This paper hypothesizes that listeners who have been exposed to pitch continuum traditions of music, in which microtonal variations are a common occurrence, will have greater sensitivity to pitch changes as compared to listeners who have not. To test this hypothesis, two perceptual experiments are designed and performed in order to study the validity of the trill and glissando thresholds, reported in the literature, for listeners who have been trained in or exposed to Indian classical music. Additionally, the dependence of these thresholds on classical music training, center frequency, rate of modulation and direction of modulation (for glissando threshold) is investigated. It was found that thresholds for such listeners were below the thresholds reported previously and that trained vocalists had lower perceptual thresholds than untrained listeners.