Testing the role of primary musical instrument on context effects in music perception

Abstract

Musicians display numerous perceptual benefits versus nonmusicians, such as better pitch and melody perception (the “musician advantage”). Recently, Shorey et al. (2021 ASA) investigated whether this musician advantage extended to spectral contrast effects (SCEs; categorization shifts produced by acoustic properties of surrounding sounds) in musical instrument recognition. Musicians and nonmusicians listened to a context sound (filtered string quartet passage highlighting frequencies of the horn or saxophone), then categorized a target sound (tone from a six-step series varying from horn to saxophone). Although musicians displayed superior pitch discrimination, their SCEs did not differ from those of nonmusicians. Importantly, separate research has reported that a musician’s instrument of training heavily influences musical perception, potentially improving frequency discrimination and rhythm perception/production. However, in the Shorey et al. study, musicians were recruited without respect to their primary instrument. This follow-up study uses the same methodology as Shorey et al. but recruits only musicians who play horn or saxophone (the instruments used as target sounds) as their primary instrument. It is predicted that horn and saxophone players will display larger SCEs than nonmusicians due to their intimate familiarity with the instrument timbres. Preliminary data are trending in the predicted direction; full results will be discussed.