AIRS 2nd Annual Conference: Seattle 2010
Title: Preference for natural singing voice in pitch-matching and sounds categorization
Authors: Yohana Leveque (Aix-en-Provence-France) & Daniele Schön (CNRS-France)
Introduction
Some studies on action imitation have shown an advantage for biological stimuli compared to
non-biological stimuli, which could be due to the mirror system. We propose a parallel
hypothesis: that auditory stimuli can be more accurately reproduced when the timbre is human
than when the timbre is synthetic. Eighteen participants judged as poor singers and fourteen
control participants performed a pitch-matching task, with vocal and synthetic models. We also
evaluated their overall singing accuracy, as well as their fine-grained discrimination capacity.
Our hypothesis was partially validated: the human model significantly helped poor singers. The
effect of the human model on production might be linked to the use of motor representations in
voice perception, which could help prepare the imitative vocal gesture. In a second study, we
tested whether motor familiarity could impact sound processing. If producibility can help
processing sounds, people should be able to categorize vocal sounds faster than non-vocal
sounds and same gender voices faster than other-gender voices. Twenty-seven participants
listened to brief natural or distorted male or female sounds in a singing voice, and were asked
to categorize them as produced by a human being or a machine. Female participants were
significantly faster in categorizing female natural voices than the other voices; in other words,
they showed an advantage for sounds they could produce. Male participants showed faster
reaction times for natural voices, whether male or female. While the impact of motor
representations will need to be further tested by means of neuroimaging studies, these results
clearly show the interest of using singing in order to explore very fundamental mechanisms
linking production and perception.
Bios
Yohana Leveque: Speech Therapist Degree, Master's Degree in Language Sciences, currently
PhD student in Language Science (Aix-en-Provence-France), supported by a grant of 3 years
from the National Research Department.
Daniele Schön: Ph.D. in Neuroscience, University of Trieste, Italy & University of AixMarseille II; Research Permanent Position at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience of the
Mediterranean, CNRS, Marseille, France.