The impact of cognitive load on operatic singers' timing performance.

Muzaffer Çorlu,Chris Muller,Pieter-Jan Maes,Marc Leman,Katty Kochman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00429

Abstract

In the present paper, we report the results of an empirical study on the effects of cognitive load on operatic singing. The main aim of the study was to investigate to what extent a working memory task affected the timing of operatic singers' performance. Thereby, we focused on singers' tendency to speed up, or slow down their performance of musical phrases and pauses. Twelve professional operatic singers were asked to perform an operatic aria three times; once without an additional working memory task, once with a concurrent working memory task (counting shapes on a computer screen), and once with a relatively more difficult working memory task (more shapes to be counted appearing one after another). The results show that, in general, singers speeded up their performance under heightened cognitive load. Interestingly, this effect was more pronounced in pauses—more in particular longer pauses—compared to musical phrases. We discuss the role of sensorimotor control and feedback processes in musical timing to explain these findings.

Highlights

Expressive music performance requires a fine-grained temporal coordination of muscle activity to control one’s musical instrument, or vocal chords in the case of singing performance
We investigated the effect of a heightened cognitive load on the musical performance of operatic singers
In general, speeded up their performance under heightened cognitive load

Summary

Introduction

Expressive music performance requires a fine-grained temporal coordination of muscle activity to control one’s musical instrument, or vocal chords in the case of singing performance. A typical effect that is observed in experiments investigating timing production under heightened cognitive load is a tendency to speed up (Krampe et al, 2010; Rattat, 2010; Çorlu et al, 2014; Maes et al, 2014) This effect is explained by memory-base models of estimated time duration, such as Ornstein’s storage-size hypothesis that states that the experience of duration is related to the amount of stored information: as the storage size increases, duration experience increases (Ornstein, 1969). In situations of heightened cognitive load, cognitive storage size will increase more rapidly, leading to an overestimation of interval durations, and correspondingly to the production of shorter temporal intervals This cognitive timekeeper approach is highly vulnerable to cognitive load and relatively inefficient in situations that require heightened cognitive load.

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