Can Listeners Hear Who Is Singing? Part B-Experienced Listeners

Previous research has shown that inexperienced listeners have a more difficult time identifying an oddball singer in a three-note task where two sung stimuli are produced by the same singer and one sung stimulus is produced by an oddball singer than they do in a six-note task where five sung stimuli are produced by the same singer and one sung stimulus is produced by the oddball singer. Such results support the idea that timbre should be understood as a transformation that connects the different sounds of one source, that a “rich” set of sounds is necessary to discover the trajectory. The role of listener experience in perceiving the trajectory, however, is unknown. This paper investigated the ability of experienced listeners to identify which pitch in an ascending or descending sequence of three or six stimuli was sung by a different singer. For three-note sequences, listeners for the most part chose the most dissimilarly pitched stimulus as coming from the oddball singer. For six-note sequences, the detection of the oddball singer was much improved. In all tasks, experienced listeners were better able to detect the oddball singer than were inexperienced listeners. These results support the idea that while listener experience is an important factor in singer discrimination, experienced and inexperienced listeners alike benefit from a “rich” set of exemplars from which to abstract the timbre transformation.