Hi folks. Long time listener, first time caller...
Some friends of mind are setting up an experiment with same/different judgements between pairs of sounds. They want to test sounds from a variety of domains: speech, music, natural sounds, etc.
One of the researchers suggested that listeners will have different listening strategies depending on the domain, and this might pose a problem for the experiment: our sensitivity for difference in pitch, for example, might be very acute for musical sounds
but much less-so for speech sounds.
I have a hunch that if the stimuli were short enough, this might sidestep the problem. Ie, if I played you 250 milliseconds of speech, or 250 milliseconds of music, you would not necessarily use any particular domain-specific listening strategy to tell
the difference. It would simply be “sound.”
I suspect this is because a sound that’s sufficiently short can stay entirely in echoic memory. For longer sounds, you have to consolidate the information somehow, and the way that you consolidate it has to do with the kind of domain it falls into. For
speech sounds, we can throw away the acute pitch information.
But that’s just a hunch. I’m wondering if this rings true for any of you, that is to say, if it reminds you of any particular research. I’d love to read about it.
It's been a pleasure to follow these e-mails. I'm glad to finally have an excuse to write. Wishing you all well.