The high-voice superiority effect in polyphonic music is influenced by experience: A comparison of musicians who play soprano-range compared with bass-range instruments.

Abstract

Western polyphonic music is typically composed of multiple simultaneous melodic lines of equal importance, referred to as Previous studies have shown that adult nonmusicians are able to encode each voice in separate parallel sensory memory traces during passive listening. Specifically, when presented with sequences composed of two simultaneous voices (melodies), listeners show mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch changes in each voice, although only 50% of trials are unchanged. Interestingly, MMN is larger for the change in the higher compared to lower voice in both musicians and nonmusicians. This high-voice superiority effect has also been found in nonmusician adults and 7-month-old infants presented with two simultaneous tones, suggesting that a more robust memory trace for the higher-pitched voice might be an innate or early-acquired characteristic of human auditory processing. The present study tested whether musicians with experience playing a bass-range instrument (e.g., cello, double bass) would show a similar high-voice superiority effect as musicians with experience playing a soprano-range instrument (e.g., violin, flute). We found that musicians playing soprano-range instruments showed a high-voice superiority effect in line with previous studies, but musicians playing bass-range instruments showed similar MMN responses for both voices. These results suggest that with years of experience playing a lower-voiced instrument, cortical encoding of the lower of two simultaneous voices can be enhanced to some extent despite the early developing bias for better encoding of the higher voice.Keywords: musical expertise, brain plasticity, auditory scene analysis (ASA), mismatch negativity (MMN), polyphonic musicSupplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0030858.suppAuditory environments typically contain multiple overlapping sounds. For example, it is not unusual in a social situation to experience simultaneously several conversations, music, animal noises, and various environmental sounds. Separating these different sound sources is referred to as auditory scene analysis (Bregman, 1990). Music itself often contains multiple simultaneous tones or melodies. For example, Western polyphonic music is composed of two or more simultaneous melodic lines (often referred to as voices), which can carry equal importance in the music. To process such music, it is crucial for individuals to be able to separate and simultaneously analyze the individual melodies as they unfold over time. Previous research has shown that for both adults (Fujioka, Trainor, Ross, Kakigi, & Pantev, 2005; Fujioka, Trainor, & Ross, 2008) and infants (Marie & Trainor, 2012), separate memory traces are formed in auditory cortex for each of two simultaneous voices. Furthermore, these studies have shown a high-voice superiority effect in that the memory trace for the higher-pitched voice is more robust than that for the lowerpitched voice. The purpose of the present experiment is to investigate whether experience playing a higher-pitched (sopranorange) compared with lower-pitched (bass-range) musical instrument affects the encoding of polyphonic music, in particular, whether the high-voice superiority effect is modified by intensive experience playing the lowest line in a musical ensemble.For both musical and nonmusical sounds, to determine what auditory objects are present, the auditory system must perform a spectrotemporal analysis of the incoming sound wave to determine which components belong together (e.g., the harmonics of a single sound source such as a musical instrument or a talker, or the successive sounds of an instrument or talker) and which groups of components belong to separate objects (e.g., two different instruments or two different talkers). These processes are known as auditory stream integration and segregation, respectively, and together they constitute auditory scene analysis. Bregman (1990) proposed that much of auditory scene analysis occurs automatically and preattentively, and this is corroborated by numerous event-related potential (ERP) studies based on electroencephalograph (EEG) or magnetoencephalograph (MEG) recordings (e. …