The Conversation Continues: the Effect of Lyrics and Music Complexity of Background Music on Spoken-Word Recognition

Scharenborg, Odette; Larson, Martha

doi:10.21437/interspeech.2018-1088

Cited by 4 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…This reveals that (additional) language-based masking (English and Simlish) has an even more negative influence on speech-in-music intelligibility than energetic masking alone (karaoke). This result was as expected and replicates previous work by Scharenborg and Larson (2018a, 2018b) who also found that music with lyrics has a greater masking effect than music without lyrics. Note however that Scharenborg and Larson (2018b) demonstrated that the effect of lyrics was present at the easier and harder SNR levels, while in the present study (Experiment 2a) it was shown that the effect of lyrics was strongest at the easy SNR level.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…SONG LYRICS AND MEANING ON SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY without lyrics. Note however that Scharenborg and Larson (2018b) demonstrated that the effect of lyrics was present at the easier and harder SNR levels, while in the present study (Experiment 2a) it was shown that the effect of lyrics was strongest at the easy SNR level. As different SNR levels have been used across studies it is hard to compare the findings of the two studies and to explain this discrepancy.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 77%

“…This question gives insight into the role of similarity between the target and the background music, as the versions with lyrics tap into a more similar level of processing (i.e., they cause both energetic and informational masking) than the ones without lyrics (i.e., energetic masking and substantially less informational masking). Following Scharenborg and Larson’s (2018a, 2018b) findings, we predicted that participants would perform better on the karaoke than the English and the Simlish version of the songs, as the karaoke version lacks lyrics that could semantically interfere with the target speech. Note that this prediction is in line with the research on the impact of lyrics on comprehension abilities, which has shown that lyrics limit cognitive semantic ability, and as a result, inhibit processing of the target task (e.g., Herring & Scott, 2018; Oswald et al, 2000).…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Note, however, that the three background songs in their study not only differed in rhythm complexity but also in genre and beats per minute, which made it difficult to isolate the effect of music complexity. As a follow-up, Scharenborg and Larson (2018b) conducted a more controlled study with similar listeners and the same task but they only used one song. The structure of the song consisted of comparable stretches with and without lyrics and had both high complexity (beat and instruments) and low complexity (beat only).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, only two studies have investigated whether background music with lyrics interferes more with speech intelligibility than without lyrics 1 (Scharenborg & Larson, 2018a, 2018b). In Scharenborg and Larson (2018a), Dutch listeners performed a word identification task, in which consonant vowel consonant (CVC) words were embedded in background music of different complexities. Their results showed that music with lyrics had a larger masking effect on spoken word intelligibility than music without lyrics, but this effect was independent of music complexity.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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“Lass frooby noo!” the interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility.

Brouwer¹,

Akkermans²,

Hendriks³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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This study examined whether song lyrics and their semantic meaning interfere with speech intelligibility. In three experiments, a total of 108 native Dutch participants listened to Dutch target sentences in the presence of three versions of the pop songs Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.) (Experiment 1) or Hot N Cold (Experiment 2a and 2b) by singer Katy Perry at different signal-to-noise ratios. The versions consisted of the original English songs, the karaoke versions of the songs without lyrics, and anomalous versions of the songs in the fictional language Simlish, which was created for the video game The Sims. The songs were played in chronological (Experiments 1 and 2a) or in random order (Experiment 2b). Participants' task was to type the target sentence they had heard. In all experiments, speech intelligibility was better in nonlyrical (karaoke) than lyrical music (English and Simlish). In addition, listeners performed better in lyrics without semantic meaning (Simlish) than with semantic meaning (English). Finally, speech intelligibility was better when the song in the background was played in chronological rather than in random order. These findings aid in understanding the mechanisms involved during speech-in-music intelligibility. Public Significance StatementThis study suggests that the presence of song lyrics and their meaning in the background negatively impact speech intelligibility. Additionally, hearing background music in its natural, chronological as opposed to a random order is beneficial for speech intelligibility.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 77%

mentioning

confidence: 95%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

“Lass frooby noo!” the interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility.

Brouwer¹,

Akkermans²,

Hendriks³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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Working memory modulates the effect of music on word learning

Ong

Chan

2022

Lang. cogn.

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While anecdotal evidence suggests that music may facilitate verbal memory, empirical evidence for this is less clear. Here, we examined whether learners’ characteristics such as age, working memory (WM), and musical training may influence the effect of music on word learning. Young and older adults learned novel word-referent mappings presented in three music conditions (spoken in the presence of background music, sung in-key, and sung out-of-key) and a control condition (spoken in quiet) and their performance was assessed immediately after learning. We found that whereas age and, to an extent, musical training had a general effect on word learning, WM modulated the effect of music: performance was worse in the music conditions relative to the control condition for learners with lower WM whereas the opposite pattern was observed for those with higher WM. Our results thus highlight the importance of considering individual characteristics in determining the effect of music on verbal memory.

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Attention, Musicality, and Familiarity Shape Cortical Speech Tracking at the Musical Cocktail Party

Brown,

Bidelman

2023

Preprint

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The cocktail party problem challenges our ability to understand speech in noisy environments, which often include background music. Here, we explored the role of background music in speech-in-noise listening. Participants listened to an audiobook in familiar and unfamiliar music while tracking keywords in either speech or song lyrics. We used EEG to measure neural tracking of the audiobook. When speech was masked by music, the modeled peak latency at 50 ms (P1TRF) was prolonged compared to unmasked. Additionally, P1TRFamplitude was larger in unfamiliar background music, suggesting improved speech tracking. We observed prolonged latencies at 100 ms (N1TRF) when speech was not the attended stimulus, though only in less musical listeners. Our results suggest early neural representations of speech are enhanced with both attention and concurrent unfamiliar music, indicating familiar music is more distracting. These data also indicate that the ability to perceptually filter musical noise at the cocktail party depends on objective musical abilities.

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The Conversation Continues: the Effect of Lyrics and Music Complexity of Background Music on Spoken-Word Recognition

Cited by 4 publications

References 26 publications

“Lass frooby noo!” the interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility.

“Lass frooby noo!” the interference of song lyrics and meaning on speech intelligibility.

Working memory modulates the effect of music on word learning

Attention, Musicality, and Familiarity Shape Cortical Speech Tracking at the Musical Cocktail Party

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