Musical nuance task shows reliable differences between musicians and nonmusicians.

Abstract

Musical nuance can be defined as the fine-grained deviations in pitch, loudness, time, and tone quality in a musical pirrase that a performer manipulates to enhance a performance. Nuance is commonly viewed as subtle qualities that add expressivity to a musical utterance. Although some researchers suggest musical nuance consists of expressive elements that include dynamics, articulations, and other stylistic qualities (Madsen, 1999), many studies in music psychology have predominantly focused on musical nuance as characterized by expressive qualities intended to produce emotion (Laukka, 2004; Lindstrom, Juslin, Bresin, & Williamon, 2003). For the purpose of this research, we will be discussing musical nuance as part of musical expressiveness revealed in subtle stylistic differences based on cultural conventions.Musical nuance is critical to listener perception and musical performance. For instance, musical nuance may be the reason that listeners would rather hear a human performance rallier than a computerized rendition (Juslin, 2003). As a result, listeners develop preferences for specific performers based on characteristics of musical nuance (Geringer & Sasanfar, 2013). On the other hand, fluid manipulation of musical nuance is one of the tools which expert performers use to demonstrate musical expression, distin- guish personal performances, and impart novelty of high value beyond that notated in the score. Differences in musical nuance allow for new and varied interpretations of familiar music.Research indicates that musicians and educators perceive expressive characteristics such as nuance as the most important element of a musical performance (Lindstrom et al., 2003). Musical training can develop aural skills and performance skills that can help the student musician perform more expressively, and many pedagogical approaches can assist with the development of expressivity such as aural modeling, verbal modeling, and mental imagery (Woody, 2006). In addition, traditional music education approaches include internalization of performance styles, performance models, and music listening via concert attendance and recordings (Timmers & Sadakata, 2014). Despite the focus on the development of aural skills and pedagogical approaches to teach for expressiveness, there seems to be no reliable and valid measures available to examine musical nuance listening ability. The purpose of this research is to examine the psychometric properties of a Musical Nuance Task (MNT) and to evaluate the role of experience in musicians and nonmusicians on musical nuance perception. We evaluated the hypothesis that musical training and previous music listening experiences can modulate the perception of subtle stylistic differences.Musical nuance is similar to expression in speech where the speaker adds subtle changes for stylistic purposes (Brandt, Gebrian, & Slevc, 2012). Fundamentally, speech perception is dependent on melody (intonation) and rhythm (stress and timing) elements. Rhythmic stress and intonation in speech is referred to as prosody. Spoken words and musical tones can be stressed on the basis of the fundamental frequency. Similarly, melodies can be segmented due to the pauses. The performer (speaker) uses an implicit understanding of the language (music or speech) to communicate with prosodic cues to the listener. Recent research in Finnish adults supports the relationship between music and speech prosody in rhythmic perception even after controlling for many other variables such as music education and working memory performance (Hausen, Torppa, Salmela, Vainio, & Sarkamo, 2013). The perception of musical prosodic cues such as those referenced by the term musical nuance occurs in a global fashion.Global ProcessingMusic consists of a combination of local and global elements, grouped by articulatory gestures performed on a variety of instruments or on the same instrument with application of various sound techniques that create subtle stylistic differences (Mottron, Peretz, & Menard, 2000). …