Can Inexperienced Listeners Hear Who Is Singing? The Role of Motivation in Singer Discrimination Across Pitch

Previous research has shown that in a task identifying singers across pitch, inexperienced listeners perform very poorly compared to their experienced counterparts. This poor performance may partially be due to lower motivation and reduced attention on the part of inexperienced listeners. The current experiment is designed to examine the role of motivation in difficult perceptual tasks through use of an established methodology that uses singing voice stimuli.

This study used an ABX paradigm. Listeners heard two different singers, singing /ɑ/ at the same pitch and had to identify which of the two singers produced a third /ɑ/ at a different pitch. Pitches varied across 1.5 octaves. Inexperienced listeners were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (1) no feedback, (2) percent correct feedback, and (3) percentile feedback. Prior to the experiment, listeners rated their motivation using the Situational Intrinsic Motivation Scale (SIMS). Data were collected from 99 inexperienced listeners.

There were no significant differences between the three feedback conditions, No Feedback, Percent Correct, and Percentile, for any SIMS subscale. Likewise, there were no significant differences in musical experience between the three feedback conditions. A repeated measures ANOVA designed to test the effect of feedback group on mean percent correct responses revealed no significant main or interaction effects of feedback. However, amotivation was a significant predictor of mean percent correct scores.

Motivation is a complex construct that, while not being a primary factor in the current audio-perceptual task, could still be an important confounding factor in perceptual research. In the case of the current study, the two feedback conditions utilized in this study, Percent Correct and Percentile, may not have provided sufficiently robust external motivation to elicit differences in performance. Perceptual and behavioral researchers should be vigilant. More research is necessary.