Abstract
We tested listeners’ ability to identify brief excerpts from popular recordings. Listeners were required to match 200- or 100-msec excerpts with the song titles and artists. Performance was well above chance levels for 200-msec excerpts and poorer but still better than chance for 100-msec excerpts. Performance fell to chance levels when dynamic (time-varying) information was disrupted by playing the 100-msec excerpts backward and when high-frequency information was omitted from the 100-msec excerpts; performance was unaffected by the removal of low-frequency information. In sum, successful identification required the presence of dynamic, high-frequency spectral information.
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Funding for this research was provided by a grant awarded to the first author from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We thank Dennis Phillips for extensive discussions about all aspects of the study, Susan Hall for her assistance in preparing Figure 1, and Andrea Halpern, Dan Levitin, John Wixted, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
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Schellenberg, E.G., Iverson, P. & Mckinnon, M.C. Name that tune: Identifying popular recordings from brief excerpts. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6, 641–646 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212973
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03212973