Enhanced salience of edge frequencies in auditory pattern recognition

Within musical scenes or textures, sounds from certain instruments capture attention more prominently than others, hinting at biases in the perception of multisource mixtures. Besides musical factors, these effects might be related to frequency biases in auditory perception. Using an auditory pattern-recognition task, we studied the existence of such frequency biases. Mixtures of pure tone melodies were presented in six frequency bands. Listeners were instructed to assess whether the target melody was part of the mixture or not, with the target melody presented either before or after the mixture. In Experiment 1, the mixture always contained melodies in five out of the six bands. In Experiment 2, the mixture contained three bands that stemmed from the lower or the higher part of the range. As expected, Experiments 1 and 2 both highlighted strong effects of presentation order, with higher accuracies for the target presented before the mixture. Notably, Experiment 1 showed that edge frequencies yielded superior accuracies compared with center frequencies. Experiment 2 corroborated this finding by yielding enhanced accuracies for edge frequencies irrespective of the absolute frequency region. Our results highlight the salience of sound elements located at spectral edges within complex musical scenes. Overall, this implies that neither the high voice superiority effect nor the insensitivity to bass instruments observed by previous research can be explained by absolute frequency biases in auditory perception.