音の高低の差とその空間的性質に関する一実験的考察

抄録

Since Pratt (J. Exper. Psychol., 13, 1930, 278-285) called attention to the phenomenon that high tones were phenomenologically higher in space that low ones, several researches were made, but the results were not in accord with one another.
The purpose of this study was to observe the tendency of tonal localization along the vertical dimension.
Including the preliminary experiment, four experiments were carried out in the soundproof room using the sound-cage. Os were always blind-folded and were seated in the center of the sound-cage, 160 cm in diameter, without the head-rest. Six or seven pure tones from 250 cps to 4100 cps were used as stimuli. They were led from a TYPE M-III no. 5111 Oscillator to a telephone receiver and were presented in haphazard order, from various positions. Os were divided into four groups in Experiment I and II, and two groups in Experiment III, according to the degree of their knowledge about this experiment.
The preliminary experiment dealt with determining the various direct conditions for the main experiments, such as headmovement, participation of other modalities in localizing response, and the method of localization, etc.
In the first experiment, Os were asked to localize each tone with their arms.
Six tones (250-, 500-, 1125-, 1750-, 2000-, 4100) were presented from seven positions (Fig. 1). With the exception of the case where the souhd source was at 90°(Fig. 2), the displacements of the localization'were measured (Table 1).
In the second experiment, the localizations by the verbal indication of the positions on the scale were made (Table 2).
Through these two experiments, the average values of the displacements, for every observer of the four groups, came out uniformly in the order, from top to bottom, 4100-, 2000-, 1750-, 1125-, 500- and 250-.
In the third experiment, following the example of Dimmick & Gaylord (J. Exper. Psychol., 17, 1034, 598-599), the displacements were measured : Os were asked to localize with their arms the tones (250-, 500-, 900-, 1125-, 1750, 2000 and 4100) coming from a telephone receivers In this experiment, tones were led from two different sources : (1) The position No. 4. in Experiment II. (2) The position got by movingt the former horizontally to the right by 45°.
The results were shown in Table 4.
Throughout all these observations, the results might be taken as supporting Pratt's proposition that high tones were phenomenologically higher in space than low tones. However, it was found in the preliminary experiment that this proposition was not applicable exactly to the tones of extremely high frequencies and to small pitch differences.