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Pitch plays an essential role in music perception and forms the fundamental component of melodic interpretation. However, objectively detecting and decoding brain responses to musical pitch perception across subjects remains to be explored. In this study, we employed electroencephalography (EEG) as an objective measure to obtain the neural responses of musical pitch perception. The EEG signals from 34 subjects under hearing violin sounds at pitches G3 and B6 were collected with an efficient passive Go/No-Go paradigm. The lightweight modified EEGNet model was proposed for EEG-based pitch classification. Specifically, within-subject modeling with the modified EEGNet model was performed to construct individually optimized models. Subsequently, based on the within-subject model pool, a classifier ensemble (CE) method was adopted to construct the cross-subject model. Additionally, we analyzed the optimal time window of brain decoding for pitch perception in the EEG data and discussed the interpretability of these models. The experiment results show that the modified EEGNet model achieved an average classification accuracy of 77% for within-subject modeling, significantly outperforming other compared methods. Meanwhile, the proposed CE method achieved an average accuracy of 74% for cross-subject modeling, significantly exceeding the chance-level accuracy of 50%. Furthermore, we found that the optimal EEG data window for the pitch perception lies 0.4 to 0.9 s onset. These promising results demonstrate that the proposed methods can be effectively used in the objective assessment of pitch perception and have generalization ability in cross-subject modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Objectives: In a tonal language like Chinese, phonologically contrasting tones signify word meanings at the syllable level. Although the development of lexical tone perception ability has been examined in many behavioral studies, its developmental trajectory from childhood to adulthood at the neural level remains unclear. This cross-sectional study aimed to examine the issue by measuring the mismatch negativity (MMN) response to a Chinese lexical tonal contrast in three groups. Methods: The MMN response to a flat-falling tonal contrast (Tone1 versus Tone4) were recorded from children (25 participants aged 6–8), adolescents (26 participants aged 12–14), and young adults (20 participants aged 18–24). Nonsense speech stimuli were also used by superimposing Tone1 and Tone4 on an English syllable. Results: All three groups demonstrated typical early MMN responses in both the meaningful and nonsense syllable conditions. However, the MMN amplitudes varied significantly across groups, with the child group showing smaller responses compared to the adolescent and adult groups, while the latter two groups had similar MMN amplitudes. Conclusions: Neural sensitivity to tonal contrasts is not fully mature in children and reaches a more adult-like level during adolescence, with no significant difference in sensitivity to meaningful versus nonsense syllables. These results provide new insights into the neural development of lexical tone perception in a tonal language, highlighting its maturation during adolescence in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]