Hearing on the edge - Enhanced salience of edge frequencies in auditory pattern recognition (en)
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Within musical scenes or textures, sounds from certain instruments capture attention more prominently than others, hinting at biases in the perception of multi-source mixtures. Besides musical factors, these effects might be related to frequency biases in auditory perception. Using an auditory pattern recognition task, we here studied the existence of such frequency biases. Mixtures of pure tone melodies were presented in six frequency bands. Listeners were instructed to assess whether a 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, Experiment 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 to 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.