Study explores how acoustic elements influence perception that music is out of tune

When we listen to a song or musical performance, out-of-tune singers or instruments are usually perceived as unpleasant to the listeners. While it is well established that disagreement can reduce enjoyment of music, the processes that influence how humans perceive disagreement have not yet been fully delineated.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota recently conducted a study aimed at better understanding the factors influencing the extent to which individuals can perceive disagreement in natural music. Their findings, published in Communication psychologyhighlight the acoustic elements that influence the perception of dissonance when hearing singing voices or out-of-tune instruments.

“An out-of-tune singer or instrument can spoil the enjoyment of music,” wrote Sara MK Madsen and Andrew J. Oxenham in their article. “However, there is disagreement about how we perceive detuning in natural musical contexts. To answer this question, we presented listeners with in-tuned and out-of-tune passages of two-part music and manipulated the two main candidate acoustic signals : beats (fluctuations caused by interactions between nearby frequency components) and inharmonicity (non-integer harmonic frequency relationships) during seven experiments.

To explore the acoustic underpinnings of disagreement-related dissonance, Madsen and Oxenham conducted a series of experiments involving different groups of participants. Their experiments involved 101, 62, 87, 28, 69, 160, and 105 participants, respectively, all recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Each participant listened to musical segments in which the instruments were either in tune or out of tune relative to each other. After each experimental trial, they were asked whether they thought the music they heard was in tune or out of tune.

The researchers manipulated two key acoustic elements of musical sequences, namely beats and inharmonicity. They then attempted to determine whether participants’ ability to recognize disagreements was affected by manipulating these two acoustic cues.

Interestingly, the researchers observed that these two acoustic elements played a key role in participants’ ability to detect disagreements between different parts of musical sequences. In particular, beat strength appeared to be closely related to individuals’ ability to perceive disagreements.

“Distuning detection significantly worsened when removing beat or inharmonic cues, suggesting important contributions from both,” Madsen and Oxenham wrote. “The relative importance of the two signals varied reliably between listeners but was not affected by musical experience. Finally, a general asymmetry in sensitivity to mistuning was found, with compressed pitch differences being more easily detected that the differences stretched.”

The results of this recent study shed new light on the contribution of beats and inharmonicities to people’s perception of dissonance when listening to out-of-tune instruments or vocals. The researchers also found that better musical experience tended to improve people’s ability to use these two acoustic cues to detect disagreement.

The experimental methods employed in this research may soon be used to conduct additional studies focused on the foundations of disagreement detection. Collectively, these research efforts could help delineate the factors that influence how humans perceive music and the extent to which it is perceived as pleasant or unpleasant.

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