Mistuning in two-part singing

This research describes the strategy of singers in reacting to the pitch deviation from equally tempered (ET) value in their ensemble partner's part in singing two-part a cappella music, and the ability of professional musicians to identify such deviations. Professional singers preferred to maintain the purity of melodic intervals in their own part and to ignore the occurring harmonic mistuning with their deviating ensemble partner. In multi-part singing, the musical interval perception ability of the singers is more finely honed for production than it is for perception, which can be explained by the enhancing effect of the memory of how to vocally produce the intervals, available only in the process of singing.