Kate Criner presents poster on her senior project

Kate Criner presented her poster "Music perception and speech perception have different sensitivities to acoustic variability" at the 2024 Undergraduate Arts and Research Showcase. Speech perception is less challenging when listening to one talker speak compared to hearing various talkers in unpredictable orders. Recently, we extended this finding to music perception, that labeling the pitches of one musical instrument is easier than labeling the pitches of various instruments in unpredictable orders. However, there is disagreement as to whether the actual number of talkers here is specific (e.g. hearing 4 different talkers is more difficult than hearing 2 talkers) or general (e.g., anything more than one talker is equally challenging), and how this extends to musical instrument perception. Kate demonstrated that pitch perception gets slower and less accurate when moving from one instrument (piano or French horn) to four similar-sounding instruments (oboe, trumpet, clarinet, alto saxophone), and again when moving to four different-sounding instruments (marimba, tubular bells, cello, trombone). The speech data were not as clear, but that also agrees with greater similarity in how different talkers say the same word as compared to different instruments playing the same tone. This successfully completes her Culminating Undergraduate Experience in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Congratulations Kate!