Phronesis
Member
Lately, I find myself often pondering how our ears and brains take the physical sound reaching our eardrums and turn that into perceptions of sounds and music. I'm hoping that others in this forum might be interested in discussing this topic, so I'm starting this thread.
I make a distinction between sound and music perception because sound perception need not involve music (a lot of the research in this area is on speech recognition), and music perception involves added layers of interpretation of the sound, emotional responses, judgments of music quality and artist intent, etc.
But I think there are important relationships between sound and music perception, which go in both directions. For example, I'm familiar with the nuances of how some musical instruments sound from playing those instruments myself, which enables me to notice details in how those instruments sound through my gear which I would otherwise not notice, and it also changes my musical perception of those instruments. At the same time, I notice how I bring expectations and moods to music when I listen to it, which changes how I direct my attention in terms of the aspects of the sound I notice (e.g., if I'm focused on a guitar solo, I may hardly notice the tonal character of the drums).
All of this has interesting aspects in terms of what's going on both consciously and subconsciously, and how that all relates to biases, listening experience, training, etc.
Focusing on bias, there doesn't seem to be much professional literature which delves into the specifics of how cognitive biases can affect our auditory perception, but I did run across this recent paper on "Overcoming Bias: Cognitive Control Reduces Susceptibility to Framing Effects in Evaluating Musical Performance."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24528-3
The paper focuses on how bias can affect perception of quality of music performances, rather than perception of sound quality. The basic finding was that, when a listener is told that a performance is by a professional musician rather than a student musician, listeners will tend to perceive the performance as being of higher quality, and this is a more consistent effect than whether the performance was actually by a professional vs student. They used fMRI to see what was happening with people's brains as they listened, and they found that telling a listener that a performer is a professional tended to cause brain responses within a few seconds which would cause the performance to be viewed more favorably, and those brain responses persisted through listening to 70-sec music excerpts, as well as after listening. These brain responses involved the listeners paying more attention. Once a listener was told that a performance was by a professional, it was difficult for listeners to conclude otherwise, even when the performance provided mounting evidence that it wasn't by a professional.
Here are some quotes from the paper:
"By modulating expectations and beliefs, contextual information can alter the enjoyability of stimuli as diverse as artworks, soda, and wine, influencing or even dominating actual sensory perception."
"... contextual information can contribute materially to positive perceptual experiences. Aesthetic experiences sometimes depend on the prior activation of a set of beliefs that dispose a person to perceiving this way—a “preparatory set” consisting of expectations and beliefs. For instance, even though listening to Joshua Bell perform a concert on the violin can cost $100 per ticket, an incognito performance by him at a subway station triggered very little interest. Generally, this evidence suggests that contextual information can affect preferences and perception in both nefarious and beneficial ways."
"Previous neuroimaging studies suggest that the influence of beliefs and expectations arises not merely from the sensory system, but from the particular sensitivity to contextual information of reward structures in the brain."
"Our analysis revealed that, when a piece was preferred, the professional pianist frame induced significantly more activity in the primary auditory cortex relative to the student pianist frame (see Fig. 2A). This suggests that beliefs regarding the quality of a performer engendered a bias in attention."
"We observed higher activation in the primary auditory cortex when the player was described as a professional pianist relative to when the player was described as a student. Moreover, this difference in activity remained consistent, exhibiting no significant changes across the 70 seconds of the excerpt. A panel regression of activity in the primary auditory cortex on time showed no significant linear slope (b1 = 0.0003, z = 0.56, p > 0.5). This supports the notion that a bias in attention began almost immediately (i.e. 4 sec) after the presentation of the framing information and remained stable throughout the evidence accumulation period. Contrary to the notion that more evidence should diminish any framing effects generating during the relatively short framing period (i.e. 4 sec), we found that the professional framing gave rise to a constant attentional bias in favor of the professional player."
"...as information about the quality of the performance accumulated, participants needed to exert cognitive control in order to form and retain a negative evaluation for performances that had been framed as played by a professional compared to those that had been framed as played by a student. These data suggest that less cognitive effort was required to dislike a performance when it had been described as played by a student rather than a professional."
"... by expecting better performance from a professional, participants directed more attention toward professionally framed pianists compared to the student-framed performances, and therefore, exhibited a heightened tendency to gather more evidence that would confirm their prior expectation about the professional player’s performance."
"From the perspective of music psychology, these findings reinforce the notion that extrinsic factors—outside the borders of the notes themselves—can impact perception and evaluation as critically as the intrinsic characteristics of the acoustic signal."
I make a distinction between sound and music perception because sound perception need not involve music (a lot of the research in this area is on speech recognition), and music perception involves added layers of interpretation of the sound, emotional responses, judgments of music quality and artist intent, etc.
But I think there are important relationships between sound and music perception, which go in both directions. For example, I'm familiar with the nuances of how some musical instruments sound from playing those instruments myself, which enables me to notice details in how those instruments sound through my gear which I would otherwise not notice, and it also changes my musical perception of those instruments. At the same time, I notice how I bring expectations and moods to music when I listen to it, which changes how I direct my attention in terms of the aspects of the sound I notice (e.g., if I'm focused on a guitar solo, I may hardly notice the tonal character of the drums).
All of this has interesting aspects in terms of what's going on both consciously and subconsciously, and how that all relates to biases, listening experience, training, etc.
Focusing on bias, there doesn't seem to be much professional literature which delves into the specifics of how cognitive biases can affect our auditory perception, but I did run across this recent paper on "Overcoming Bias: Cognitive Control Reduces Susceptibility to Framing Effects in Evaluating Musical Performance."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-24528-3
The paper focuses on how bias can affect perception of quality of music performances, rather than perception of sound quality. The basic finding was that, when a listener is told that a performance is by a professional musician rather than a student musician, listeners will tend to perceive the performance as being of higher quality, and this is a more consistent effect than whether the performance was actually by a professional vs student. They used fMRI to see what was happening with people's brains as they listened, and they found that telling a listener that a performer is a professional tended to cause brain responses within a few seconds which would cause the performance to be viewed more favorably, and those brain responses persisted through listening to 70-sec music excerpts, as well as after listening. These brain responses involved the listeners paying more attention. Once a listener was told that a performance was by a professional, it was difficult for listeners to conclude otherwise, even when the performance provided mounting evidence that it wasn't by a professional.
Here are some quotes from the paper:
"By modulating expectations and beliefs, contextual information can alter the enjoyability of stimuli as diverse as artworks, soda, and wine, influencing or even dominating actual sensory perception."
"... contextual information can contribute materially to positive perceptual experiences. Aesthetic experiences sometimes depend on the prior activation of a set of beliefs that dispose a person to perceiving this way—a “preparatory set” consisting of expectations and beliefs. For instance, even though listening to Joshua Bell perform a concert on the violin can cost $100 per ticket, an incognito performance by him at a subway station triggered very little interest. Generally, this evidence suggests that contextual information can affect preferences and perception in both nefarious and beneficial ways."
"Previous neuroimaging studies suggest that the influence of beliefs and expectations arises not merely from the sensory system, but from the particular sensitivity to contextual information of reward structures in the brain."
"Our analysis revealed that, when a piece was preferred, the professional pianist frame induced significantly more activity in the primary auditory cortex relative to the student pianist frame (see Fig. 2A). This suggests that beliefs regarding the quality of a performer engendered a bias in attention."
"We observed higher activation in the primary auditory cortex when the player was described as a professional pianist relative to when the player was described as a student. Moreover, this difference in activity remained consistent, exhibiting no significant changes across the 70 seconds of the excerpt. A panel regression of activity in the primary auditory cortex on time showed no significant linear slope (b1 = 0.0003, z = 0.56, p > 0.5). This supports the notion that a bias in attention began almost immediately (i.e. 4 sec) after the presentation of the framing information and remained stable throughout the evidence accumulation period. Contrary to the notion that more evidence should diminish any framing effects generating during the relatively short framing period (i.e. 4 sec), we found that the professional framing gave rise to a constant attentional bias in favor of the professional player."
"...as information about the quality of the performance accumulated, participants needed to exert cognitive control in order to form and retain a negative evaluation for performances that had been framed as played by a professional compared to those that had been framed as played by a student. These data suggest that less cognitive effort was required to dislike a performance when it had been described as played by a student rather than a professional."
"... by expecting better performance from a professional, participants directed more attention toward professionally framed pianists compared to the student-framed performances, and therefore, exhibited a heightened tendency to gather more evidence that would confirm their prior expectation about the professional player’s performance."
"From the perspective of music psychology, these findings reinforce the notion that extrinsic factors—outside the borders of the notes themselves—can impact perception and evaluation as critically as the intrinsic characteristics of the acoustic signal."