The Effect of Timbre and Loudness on Melody Segregation

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of three acoustic parameters on the difficulty of segregating a simple 4-note melody from a background of interleaved distractor notes. Melody segregation difficulty ratings were recorded while three acoustic parameters of the distractor notes were varied separately: intensity, temporal envelope, and spectral envelope. Statistical analyses revealed a significant effect of music training on difficulty rating judgments. For participants with music training, loudness was the most efficient perceptual cue, and no difference was found between the dimensions of timbre influenced by temporal and spectral envelope. For the group of listeners with less music training, both loudness and spectral envelope were the most efficient cues. We speculate that the difference between musicians and nonmusicians may be due to differences in processing the stimuli: musicians may process harmonic sound sequences using brain networks specialized for music, whereas nonmusicians may use speech networks.

[1]  David Wessel,et al.  Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure , 1979 .

[2]  G. Jackson,et al.  Finding your voice: A singing lesson from functional imaging , 2011, Human brain mapping.

[3]  J. Marozeau,et al.  Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music: The effect of musical expertise and of the duration of the excerpts , 2005 .

[4]  Stephen McAdams,et al.  Postrecognition of interleaved melodies as an indirect measure of auditory stream formation. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[5]  P. Iverson,et al.  Auditory stream segregation by musical timbre: effects of static and dynamic acoustic attributes. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[6]  R Cusack,et al.  Effects of differences in timbre on sequential grouping , 2000, Perception & psychophysics.

[7]  N. Kraus,et al.  Relationships between behavior, brainstem and cortical encoding of seen and heard speech in musicians and non-musicians , 2008, Hearing Research.

[8]  A S Bregman,et al.  The influence of different timbre attributes on the perceptual segregation of complex-tone sequences. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  Daniel Reisberg,et al.  On the Perception of Interleaved Melodies , 1995 .

[10]  J. Hupé,et al.  Temporal Dynamics of Auditory and Visual Bistability Reveal Common Principles of Perceptual Organization , 2006, Current Biology.

[11]  Hideki Kawahara,et al.  YIN, a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  L. V. Noorden.  Temporal coherence in the perception of tone sequences , 1975 .

[13]  R. Meddis,et al.  Time decay of auditory stream biasing , 1997, Perception & psychophysics.

[14]  R Meddis,et al.  Computer simulation of auditory stream segregation in alternating-tone sequences. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  B. Moore,et al.  A Model of Loudness Applicable to Time-Varying Sounds , 2002 .

[16]  M. Scherg,et al.  Morphology of Heschl's gyrus reflects enhanced activation in the auditory cortex of musicians , 2002, Nature Neuroscience.

[17]  S. McAdams,et al.  Acoustic correlates of timbre space dimensions: a confirmatory study using synthetic tones. , 2005, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[18]  A. de Cheveigné,et al.  The dependency of timbre on fundamental frequency. , 2003, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[19]  R. Carlyon.  How the brain separates sounds , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[20]  Douglas Johnson,et al.  Stream Segregation and Peripheral Channeling , 1991 .

[21]  Jessica M. Foxton,et al.  Effects of attention and unilateral neglect on auditory stream segregation. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[22]  Patrick J. F. Groenen,et al.  Modern Multidimensional Scaling: Theory and Applications , 2003 .

[23]  I. Nelken.  Demonstrations of Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound by Albert S. Bregman and Pierre A. Ahad, MIT Press, 1996. £15.95 CD , 1997, Trends in Neurosciences.

[24]  G. Soete,et al.  Perceptual scaling of synthesized musical timbres: Common dimensions, specificities, and latent subject classes , 1995, Psychological research.

[25]  Alexandra Bendixen,et al.  Regular patterns stabilize auditory streams. , 2010, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[26]  Jeremy Marozeau,et al.  The Effect of Visual Cues on Auditory Stream Segregation in Musicians and Non-Musicians , 2010, PloS one.

[27]  R Cusack,et al.  Effects of Similarity in Bandwidth on the Auditory Sequential Streaming of Two-Tone Complexes , 1999, Perception.

[28]  Aniruddh D. Patel,et al.  An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music , 2003, Cognition.

[29]  Claude Alain,et al.  Concurrent Sound Segregation Is Enhanced in Musicians , 2009, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

[30]  A. Oxenham,et al.  Sequential stream segregation in the absence of spectral cues. , 1999, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[31]  W. Dowling.  The perception of interleaved melodies , 1973 .

[32]  A. de Cheveigné,et al.  The effect of fundamental frequency on the brightness dimension of timbre. , 2007, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.