Bürgel Michel, Mares Diana, Siedenburg Kai
Dept. of Medical Physics and Acoustics, Carl Von Ossietzy University of Oldenburg, 26129, Oldenburg, Germany.
Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory, Graz University of Technology, 8010, Graz, Austria.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2024 Nov;86(8):2811-2820. doi: 10.3758/s13414-024-02971-x. Epub 2024 Oct 26.
Within musical scenes or textures, sounds from certain instruments capture attention more prominently than others, hinting at biases in the perception of multisource mixtures. Besides musical factors, these effects might be related to frequency biases in auditory perception. Using an auditory pattern-recognition task, we studied the existence of such frequency biases. Mixtures of pure tone melodies were presented in six frequency bands. Listeners were instructed to assess whether the target melody was part of the mixture or not, with the target melody presented either before or after the mixture. In Experiment 1, the mixture always contained melodies in five out of the six bands. In Experiment 2, the mixture contained three bands that stemmed from the lower or the higher part of the range. As expected, Experiments 1 and 2 both highlighted strong effects of presentation order, with higher accuracies for the target presented before the mixture. Notably, Experiment 1 showed that edge frequencies yielded superior accuracies compared with center frequencies. Experiment 2 corroborated this finding by yielding enhanced accuracies for edge frequencies irrespective of the absolute frequency region. Our results highlight the salience of sound elements located at spectral edges within complex musical scenes. Overall, this implies that neither the high voice superiority effect nor the insensitivity to bass instruments observed by previous research can be explained by absolute frequency biases in auditory perception.
在音乐场景或织体中，某些乐器发出的声音比其他声音更能吸引注意力，这暗示了在多源混合声音感知中存在偏差。除了音乐因素外，这些效应可能与听觉感知中的频率偏差有关。我们使用一项听觉模式识别任务来研究这种频率偏差的存在。纯音旋律的混合体在六个频段中呈现。听众被要求判断目标旋律是否是混合体的一部分，目标旋律在混合体之前或之后呈现。在实验1中，混合体总是包含六个频段中五个频段的旋律。在实验2中，混合体包含来自频段范围较低或较高部分的三个频段。正如预期的那样，实验1和实验2都突出了呈现顺序的强烈影响，混合体之前呈现的目标准确率更高。值得注意的是，实验1表明，与中心频率相比，边缘频率产生了更高的准确率。实验2通过无论绝对频率区域如何，边缘频率都具有更高的准确率，证实了这一发现。我们的结果突出了复杂音乐场景中位于频谱边缘的声音元素的显著性。总体而言，这意味着先前研究中观察到的高音优势效应和对低音乐器的不敏感都不能用听觉感知中的绝对频率偏差来解释。
