Bürgel, Michel and Picinali, Lorenzo and Siedenburg, Kai
(2021)
Listening in the Mix: Lead Vocals Robustly Attract Auditory Attention in Popular Music.
Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
ISSN 1664-1078
Abstract
Listeners can attend to and track instruments or singing voices in complex musical
mixtures, even though the acoustical energy of sounds from individual instruments may
overlap in time and frequency. In popular music, lead vocals are often accompanied by
sound mixtures from a variety of instruments, such as drums, bass, keyboards, and
guitars. However, little is known about how the perceptual organization of such musical
scenes is affected by selective attention, and which acoustic features play the most
important role. To investigate these questions, we explored the role of auditory attention
in a realistic musical scenario. We conducted three online experiments in which participants
detected single cued instruments or voices in multi-track musical mixtures. Stimuli
consisted of 2-s multi-track excerpts of popular music. In one condition, the target cue
preceded the mixture, allowing listeners to selectively attend to the target. In another
condition, the target was presented after the mixture, requiring a more “global” mode of
listening. Performance differences between these two conditions were interpreted as
effects of selective attention. In Experiment 1, results showed that detection performance
was generally dependent on the target’s instrument category, but listeners were more
accurate when the target was presented prior to the mixture rather than the opposite.
Lead vocals appeared to be nearly unaffected by this change in presentation order and
achieved the highest accuracy compared with the other instruments, which suggested
a particular salience of vocal signals in musical mixtures. In Experiment 2, filtering was
used to avoid potential spectral masking of target sounds. Although detection accuracy
increased for all instruments, a similar pattern of results was observed regarding the
instrument-specific differences between presentation orders. In Experiment 3, adjusting
the sound level differences between the targets reduced the effect of presentation order,
but did not affect the differences between instruments. While both acoustic manipulations
facilitated the detection of targets, vocal signals remained particularly salient, which
suggest that the manipulated features did not contribute to vocal salience. These findings
demonstrate that lead vocals serve as robust attractor points of auditory attention
regardless of the manipulation of low-level acoustical cues.
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