Larrouy-Maestri, Pauline; Harrison, Peter M. C. and Müllensiefen, Daniel. 2019. The mistuning perception test: A new measurement instrument. Behavior Research Methods, 51(2), pp. 663-675. ISSN 1554-3528 [Article]

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Abstract or Description

An important aspect of the perceived quality of vocal music is the degree to which the vocalist sings in tune. Although most listeners seem sensitive to vocal mistuning, little is known about the development of this perceptual ability or how it differs between listeners. Motivated by a lack of suitable preexisting measures, we introduce in this article an adaptive and ecologically valid test of mistuning perception ability. The stimulus material consisted of short excerpts (6 to 12 s in length) from pop music performances (obtained from MedleyDB; Bittner et al., 2014) for which the vocal track was pitch-shifted relative to the instrumental tracks. In a first experiment, 333 listeners were tested on a two-alternative forced choice task that tested discrimination between a pitch-shifted and an unaltered version of the same audio clip. Explanatory item response modeling was then used to calibrate an adaptive version of the test. A subsequent validation experiment applied this adaptive test to 66 participants with a broad range of musical expertise, producing evidence of the test’s reliability, convergent validity, and divergent validity. The test is ready to be deployed as an experimental tool and should make an important contribution to our understanding of the human ability to judge mistuning.

Item Type:	Article
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01225-1
Additional Information:	P.L.-M. was supported by the Max Planck Society, P.M.C.H. was supported by the EPSRC and the AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Media and Arts Technology (EP/L01632X/1), and D.M. was supported by the Humboldt Foundation’s Anneliese Maier research prize.
Keywords:	Pitch perception, Musical abilities, Pitch accuracy, Gold-MSI
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Psychology
Dates:	Date Event 31 February 2019 Accepted 28 March 2019 Published
Item ID:	26140
Date Deposited:	03 Apr 2019 13:11
Last Modified:	12 Jun 2021 10:34
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/26140

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