The effect of superior auditory skills on vocal accuracy

Abstract

The relationship between auditory perception and vocal production has been typically investigated by evaluating the effect of either altered or degraded auditory feedback on speech production in either normal hearing or hearing-impaired individuals. Our goal in the present study was to examine this relationship in individuals with superior auditory abilities. Thirteen professional musicians and thirteen nonmusicians, with no vocal or singing training, participated in this study. For vocal production accuracy, subjects were presented with three tones. They were asked to reproduce the pitch using the vowel /a/. This procedure was repeated three times. The fundamental frequency of each production was measured using an autocorrelation pitch detection algorithm designed for this study. The musicians' superior auditory abilities (compared to the nonmusicians) were established in a frequency discrimination task reported elsewhere. Results indicate that (a) musicians had better vocal production accuracy than nonmusicians (production errors of 1/2 a semitone compared to 1.3 semitones, respectively); (b) frequency discrimination thresholds explain 43% of the variance of the production data, and (c) all subjects with superior frequency discrimination thresholds showed accurate vocal production; the reverse relationship, however, does not hold true. In this study we provide empirical evidence to the importance of auditory feedback on vocal production in listeners with superior auditory skills.

Experience-Dependent Modulation of Feedback Integration during Singing: Role of the Right Anterior Insula

“…This obvious role of auditory feedback in vocal production has led to several behavioral (Burnett et al, 1998;Jones and Munhall, 2000;Larson et al, 2001Larson et al, , 2008Amir et al, 2003) and neuroimaging (Zarate and Zatorre, 2008;Parkinson et al, 2012) investigations of the auditory-motor basis of singing and speaking. Although audition is important in monitoring voice production, somatosensory afferents also provide crucial information about vocal tract configurations (Tremblay et al, 2003).…”

Generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition

“…A considerable body of research suggests that musicians tend to out-perform non-musicians in perceiving fine differences in a number of basic auditory properties, including frequency and/or pitch (Spiegel & Watson, 1984;Micheyl et al, 2006;Kishon-Rabin et al, 2001;Amir, Amir & Kishon-Rabin, 2003;Nikjeh, Lister & Frisch, 2009;Koelsch, Schröger & Tervaniemi, 1999;Parbery-Clark et al, 2009b), tone interval size (Zarate, Ritson & Poeppel, 2012Siegel & Siegel, 1977), temporal interval size (Rammsayer & Altenmüller, 2006;Cicchini et al, 2012;Ehrle & Samson, 2005), and timbre (Pitt, 1994). Below, we review evidence for lower-level and contextually-relevant perceptual advantages in differently trained musician cohorts.…”

Neural mechanisms for learned birdsong

“…This residual variability is quite small: Even adult Society finches, which express a relatively high level of variability in their crystallized songs, still control fundamental frequency of individual syllables to within ;1%-a value much more precise than observed for human speech phones and only slightly less precise than repetitions of a single note sung by a trained human vocalist (Sundberg et al 1996;Amir et al 2003;Tumer and Brainard 2007). The functional significance of this residual variability remains unclear.…”