Layman versus Professional Musician: Who Makes the Better Judge?

Abstract

The increasing number of casting shows and talent contests in the media over the past years suggests a public interest in rating the quality of vocal performances. In many of these formats, laymen alongside music experts act as judges. Whereas experts' judgments are considered objective and reliable when it comes to evaluating singing voice, little is known about laymen’s ability to evaluate peers. On the one hand, layman listeners–who by definition did not have any formal training or regular musical practice–are known to have internalized the musical rules on which singing accuracy is based. On the other hand, layman listeners’ judgment of their own vocal skills is highly inaccurate. Also, when compared with that of music experts, their level of competence in pitch perception has proven limited. The present study investigates laypersons' ability to objectively evaluate melodies performed by untrained singers. For this purpose, laymen listeners were asked to judge sung melodies. The results were compared with those of music experts who had performed the same task in a previous study. Interestingly, the findings show a high objectivity and reliability in layman listeners. Whereas both the laymen's and experts' definition of pitch accuracy overlap, differences regarding the musical criteria employed in the rating task were evident. The findings suggest that the effect of expertise is circumscribed and limited and supports the view that laypersons make trustworthy judges when evaluating the pitch accuracy of untrained singers.

Familiar Tonal Context Improves Accuracy of Pitch Interval Perception

“…This outcome suggests that the benefit of familiar tonal context was not dependent on amount of musical training. In this respect, the outcomes are consistent with the conclusion of Bigand and Pineau (1997) that non-musicians are as sensitive to tonal structures as musicians, as well as more recent findings showing that when judging singers, even non-musicians are highly sensitive to mistunings from the equal-temperament scale ( Hutchins et al, 2012 ; Larrouy-Maestri et al, 2015 ), presumably learned through passive exposure. It is also consistent with the finding that even non-musicians exhibit early right-anterior negativity (ERAN) in response to violations of tonal expectations ( Koelsch et al, 2000 ).…”

The mistuning perception test: A new measurement instrument

“…In the case of solo melodies, it has been observed that the enlargement or compression of intervals between consecutive tones size is the best predictor for pitch accuracy judgments (Larrouy-Maestri et al, 2015) and that tolerance threshold is highly consistent whatever the direction of the deviation (enlargement or compression), or the position or size of the interval manipulated within the melody (Larrouy-Maestri, 2018). The consistency of tolerance with regard to mistuning in the case of pop music remains to be explored but our results already confirm that the absolute pitch shifts can be considered as a relevant criterion for the Mistuning Perception Test.…”

“…The criterion we used was the relationship between item difficulty and magnitude of the pitch shift. We reasoned that, for a “well-behaved” musical extract, mistuning perception difficulty should be strongly influenced by the amount of pitch shift, with larger shifts corresponding to easier items (e.g., Larrouy-Maestri et al, 2015). Concretely, we examined the Pearson correlations between mean success rate and pitch shift level across all musical excerpts, as well as at the level of individual musical excerpts.…”

“…Lay listeners make reliable judges of vocal pitch accuracy in singing performances and have an intuitive notion of what sounds “correct” or “right” (Larrouy-Maestri, Magis, Grabenhorst, & Morsomme, 2015). This notion of correctness depends on musical rules learned implicitly through cultural exposure (e.g., Bigand & Poulin-Charronnat, 2006).…”

Music stimuli in mindfulness meditation: Comparison of musician and non-musician responses

“…Contrastingly, more recent research indicates similar music-induced emotions reported by musicians and non-musicians (Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau, & Dacquet, 2005). In fact, untrained judges evaluate music with a high degree of accuracy and reliability when compared to musicians, but they seem to use different evaluation criteria, such as more attention to pitch interval variation, but less to number of contour errors and modulation variation (Larrouy-Maestri, Magis, Grabenhorst, & Morsomme, 2015). This discrepancy may point to different cognitive mechanisms for music processing, but similar overt ratings of music preference.…”