Demos

Context effects in perception of musical instruments

The frequency makeup of earlier sounds influences what sounds you perceive later. These influences (known as Spectral Contrast Effects, or SCEs) date back more than a half-century in speech perception research. In earlier work, we extended these influences to perception of musical instruments (French horn and tenor saxophone), showing just how general these effects are. We asked this question using two different approaches: earlier sounds were carefully edited to emphasize the frequencies of the saxophone or the horn (Filtered examples below), or, we just presented saxophone or horn excerpts (Unfiltered examples below). Click below for sample trials and see what you think the instrument at the end of each trial is: a French horn or a tenor saxophone. The horn context and the string quintet filtered to emphasize horn frequencies should make the target instrument sound more like a saxophone, and the saxophone context and the string quintet filtered to emphasize saxophone frequencies should make the target instrument sound more like a horn. (These are sample trials from Experiment 2 in Lanning & Stilp, in press at Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics)