Madsen Sara M K, Oxenham Andrew J
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Hearing Systems Group, Department of Health Technology, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Oct 2;2(1):91. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00141-1.
An out-of-tune singer or instrument can ruin the enjoyment of music. However, there is disagreement on how we perceive mistuning in natural music settings. To address this question, we presented listeners with in-tune and out-of-tune passages of two-part music and manipulated the two primary candidate acoustic cues: beats (fluctuations caused by interactions between nearby frequency components) and inharmonicity (non-integer harmonic frequency relationships) across seven experiments (Exp 1: N = 101; Exp 2: N = 63; Exp 3a: N = 87; Exp 3b: N = 28; Exp 3c: N = 69; Exp 4: N = 160; Exp 5: N = 105). Mistuning detection worsened markedly when removing either beating or inharmonicity cues, suggesting important contributions from both. The relative importance of the two cues varied reliably between listeners but was unaffected by musical experience. Finally, a general asymmetry in sensitivity to mistuning was discovered, with compressed pitch differences being more easily detected than stretched ones, thereby demonstrating a generalization of the previously found stretched-octave effect. Overall, the results reveal the acoustic underpinnings of the critical perceptual phenomenon of dissonance through mistuning in natural music.
跑调的歌手或乐器会破坏音乐带来的愉悦感。然而，对于我们如何在自然音乐环境中感知音不准，存在不同观点。为了解决这个问题，我们向听众呈现了两部分音乐的准调和不准调段落，并在七个实验中操控了两个主要的声学线索：节拍（由相邻频率成分之间的相互作用引起的波动）和不和谐性（非整数谐波频率关系）（实验1：N = 101；实验2：N = 63；实验3a：N = 87；实验3b：N = 28；实验3c：N = 69；实验4：N = 160；实验5：N = 105）。去除节拍或不和谐性线索时，音不准检测显著变差，这表明两者都有重要作用。这两个线索的相对重要性在听众之间可靠地变化，但不受音乐经验影响。最后，发现了对音不准敏感度的普遍不对称性，即压缩的音高差异比拉伸的音高差异更容易被检测到，从而证明了先前发现的拉伸八度效应的普遍性。总体而言，研究结果揭示了自然音乐中通过音不准产生的关键感知现象——不和谐的声学基础。
