The influence of vocal expertise on the perception of microrhythm in song and speech

Musical expertise affects the perception of the temporal location of a musical sound, often to a significant degree. In a study involving jazz musicians, electronic dance music (EDM) music producers, and Norwegian folk musicians, Danielsen et al. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 84, 599-615, (2022) found significant between-group differences regarding the mean location as well as the variability around that mean for a set of control and genre-specific musical sounds. The present study extends these findings to singers who are experts in jazz versus classical music genres. In two experiments participants were presented with sung (Exp. 1) and sung and spoken (Exp. 2) syllables. In both the task was to synchronize either taps or a click track with a looped target sound. In both experiments, we found that classical participants tended to place the mean location later (relative to the acoustic onset) than jazz participants, and likewise had greater variability. Interestingly, and contra to our hypothesis, this between-group difference persisted even when the stimuli were spoken rather than sung. The current study gives further insights into how musical expertise impacts the low-level processing of musical sounds and provides a window into the interaction between top-down and bottom-up aspects of music and auditory perception more generally. In addition, it provides insight into how musicians approach musical and quasi-musical tasks, as well as the way they perceive the acoustic aspects of sound both as a musical object in its own right as well as a cue for perception-action coupling with their fellow musicians.