Investigation of Effect of Singer’s Voice Volume in a Music Piece on Listener’s Subjective Evaluations and Linguistic Tasks

We often listen to music pieces during their tasks with expectations to make the listers happy and contribute to good performance. However, previous studies revealed that the singer’s voice interrupts the linguistic task because realizing the lyrics consumes brain resources. The authors hypothesize that the difference in the voice volume affects the listener’s subjective evaluations and linguistic tasks. Twenty-one Japanese students participated in the listening experiments. They performed the linguistic task while listening to four kinds of music pieces based on a famous music piece with Japanese lyrics. Four music stimuli were composed as follows: (1) only musical instruments without voice; (2) the volume of singing voices was lower than instruments; (3) the singing voices and instruments were at the same level of volume; (4) the volume of voice was larger than instruments. The experimental results showed a significant effect on the subjective easiness of the linguistic task.