Abstract
Listeners can attend to and track instruments or singing voices in complex musical mixtures, even though the acoustical energy of sounds from individual instruments may overlap in time and frequency. In popular music, lead vocals are often accompanied by sound mixtures from a variety of instruments, such as drums, bass, keyboards, and guitars. However, little is known about how the perceptual organization of such musical scenes is affected by selective attention, and which acoustic features play the most important role. To investigate these questions, we explored the role of auditory attention in a realistic musical scenario. We conducted three online experiments in which participants detected single cued instruments or voices in multi-track musical mixtures. Stimuli consisted of 2-s multi-track excerpts of popular music. In one condition, the target cue preceded the mixture, allowing listeners to selectively attend to the target. In another condition, the target was presented after the mixture, requiring a more “global” mode of listening. Performance differences between these two conditions were interpreted as effects of selective attention. In Experiment 1, results showed that detection performance was generally dependent on the target’s instrument category, but listeners were more accurate when the target was presented prior to the mixture rather than the opposite. Lead vocals appeared to be nearly unaffected by this change in presentation order and achieved the highest accuracy compared with the other instruments, which suggested a particular salience of vocal signals in musical mixtures. In Experiment 2, filtering was used to avoid potential spectral masking of target sounds. Although detection accuracy increased for all instruments, a similar pattern of results was observed regarding the instrument-specific differences between presentation orders. In Experiment 3, adjusting the sound level differences between the targets reduced the effect of presentation order, but did not affect the differences between instruments. While both acoustic manipulations facilitated the detection of targets, vocal signals remained particularly salient, which suggest that the manipulated features did not contribute to vocal salience. These findings demonstrate that lead vocals serve as robust attractor points of auditory attention regardless of the manipulation of low-level acoustical cues.
Highlights
In everyday life, our sense of hearing is exposed to complex acoustical scenes that need to be analyzed and interpreted
Detection accuracy differed depending on the target category and order of presentation, which was evident in our model (Instrument: χ2 = 97.881, p < 0.001, order alone (Order): χ2 = 38.878, p < 0.001.)
Detection accuracy was affected by the filter type (TBP = target is filtered with a bandpass, TBS = target is filtered with bandstop), presentation order, and instrument type
Summary
Our sense of hearing is exposed to complex acoustical scenes that need to be analyzed and interpreted. A prime example of this is listening to music with multiple instruments playing at once. Human listeners can focus and track a single instrument remarkably well, even though the acoustic signal is a potentially ambiguous clutter of diverse instrument signals. Two interwoven analytical processes are used in ASA: endogenous top-down and exogenous bottom-up processes. Exogenous processes are driven by pre-attentive processes based on the temporal and spectral properties of a sound, from which auditory attributes, such as duration, pitch, or timbre are computed, and which are pivotal for grouping auditory information into separate sound events. Often described as “texture” or “tone color” (Helmholtz, 1885), is a multidimensional attribute (Siedenburg and McAdams, 2017) that enables the discrimination of sound sources (e.g., sounds from a keyboard vs a guitar), even though they may match in other acoustic cues such as loudness and pitch
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