The Change-Deafness Phenomenon in Harmonic Chords

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated surprisingly poor performance in participants who are asked to detect changes in briefly disrupted auditory scenes. So far, this change-deafness phenomenon has been found in naturalistic sound scenes and random pure-tone stacks. We now present evidence for this effect in harmonic chords, that is, in a different, yet fundamental aspect of human auditory experience. We investigated the influence of the type of disruption and its duration on change detection. Change deafness was observed regardless of whether white noise or silence had disrupted the chords and was stronger for deleted than for added tones. Crucially, the change-deafness effect was only observed for gaps exceeding 60 ms, and increased with gap durations up to 2000 ms. The present data, in line with previous studies using different stimuli, support the view that the effect is due to a masking of the change-related transient and to the decay of a time-dependent process. For the stimuli at hand, the decay of neural-adaptation-based auditory enhancement is suggested.