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Dissociating the processing of operatic and natural vocal sounds through interference effects on working memory
Adél Bihari1,2, Ádám Nárai1,3, Boris Kleber4
1Brain Imaging Centre, HUN-REN Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest.
Background And Purpose:
Mastering the operatic voice requires many years of intensive training and leads to a widespread, global impact on the structural and functional organization of the human brain. However, whether training and experience in producing operatic style singing develops differential neural representation for operatic and natural voices in opera singers remains unexplored.
Methods:
We addressed this question by investigating the representation of short melodies sung in two distinct styles - a full operatic voice with vibrato (operatic style) and a straight voice without vibrato (natural style) - in working memory (WM) of professionally trained opera singers and amateur choir singers, using a distractor interference paradigm.
Results:
The results revealed that distractor effects on WM performance for operatic, but not for natural voices significantly differed depending on the type of delay distractors (P=0.0011). WM performance for operatic voices was significantly higher in the case of congruent, operatic voice distractor stimuli as compared to incongruent, natural voice distractor stimuli (P=0.0043).
Conclusion:
Our findings that operatic and natural voice distractors have differential effects on WM performance of both opera and choir singers for operatic voices imply that partially separate neural resources might be involved in maintaining natural and operatic voices in singers' WM, independent of any prior opera singing training.
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