Abstract:
Musicians display a variety of auditory perceptual benefits relative to people with little or no musical training; these benefits are collectively referred to as the \"musician advantage.\" Importantly, musicians consistently outperform nonmusicians for tasks relating to pitch, but there are mixed reports as to musicians outperforming nonmusicians for timbre-related tasks. Due to their experience manipulating the timbre of their instrument or voice in performance, we hypothesized that musicians would be more sensitive to acoustic context effects stemming from the spectral changes in timbre across a musical context passage (played by a string quintet then filtered) and a target instrument sound (French horn or tenor saxophone; Experiment 1). Additionally, we investigated the role of a musician\'s primary instrument of instruction by recruiting French horn and tenor saxophone players to also complete this task (Experiment 2). Consistent with the musician advantage literature, musicians exhibited superior pitch discrimination to nonmusicians. Contrary to our main hypothesis, there was no difference between musicians and nonmusicians in how spectral context effects shaped instrument sound categorization. Thus, musicians may only outperform nonmusicians for some auditory skills relevant to music (e.g., pitch perception) but not others (e.g., timbre perception via spectral differences).
摘要:
相对于很少或没有音乐训练的人,音乐家表现出各种听觉感知的好处;这些好处统称为音乐家的优势。“重要的是,音乐家在与音高有关的任务中始终胜过非音乐家,但是关于音乐家在音色相关任务中表现优于非音乐家的报道好坏参半。由于他们在演奏中操纵乐器或声音的音色的经验,我们假设音乐家对音乐背景通道(由弦乐五重奏演奏,然后过滤)和目标乐器声音(法国号角或男高音萨克斯管;实验1)中音色的频谱变化产生的声学背景效应更加敏感。此外,我们通过招募法国号角和男高音萨克斯管演奏者来完成这项任务,调查了音乐家的主要教学乐器的作用(实验2)。与音乐家的优势文学一致,音乐家表现出比非音乐家更高的音调歧视。与我们的主要假设相反,音乐家和非音乐家在频谱上下文如何影响乐器声音分类方面没有区别。因此,音乐家可能只在与音乐相关的一些听觉技能方面优于非音乐家(例如,音调感知),但不是其他(例如,通过频谱差异感知音色)。