What you see is what you hear: The importance of visual priming in music performer identification

Abstract

Visual information plays a critical role in the assessment of music performance. Audiovisual integration is well recognised in person perception, and people readily match talking faces to speaking voices. This effect exists in identifying music performers, but its strength is untested. This study investigated the importance of visual or audio priming in identifying a music performer from a line-up. Half the participants saw a target saxophonist (no sound) and then heard a line-up (no visuals) of saxophonists playing (2 to 5 saxophonists). In contrast, half the participants heard a target saxophonist (no visuals) and then saw the line-up (no sound). Participants identified the target saxophonist in visual and audio line-ups at a rate above chance, although identification accuracy decreased as the line-up number increased. Those who saw the targets identified a significantly greater number of performers from the audio line-up than those who heard the targets and identified them from a visual line-up. As the task complexity and number of distractors increased, responses remained consistent and visual priming was robust and reliable in performer identification.Audiovisual integration is critical to the reception of music performance. While listeners maintain they are focused on sound when evaluating performers, recent music research suggests that audiences use visual information to complement their audio experience and that visual information alone can transmit musical intentions and quality. By isolating audio and visual representations of performance, we can ascertain where musical and extra-musical cues are

Descriptions and Evaluations of "Good Singing" in the Age of 'The Voice'

“…Other studies on perception of musical performance have investigated the role of visual information in addition to sound information (e.g. Davidson, 1993;Mitchell & MacDonald, 2016). A case study of high profile CCM singer, Annie Lennox, highlights that gesture in singing is crucial for observers to perceive expression (Davidson, 2001).…”

“…Again, in keeping with the small scale of this pilot study, we were not concerned with listeners' ability to differentiate between singers or to recognise specific singers (cf. Mitchell & MacDonald, 2011;Mitchell & MacDonald, 2012;Mitchell & MacDonald, 2016), but focused on descriptions and evaluations only. We therefore hypothesized that, due to its dominance within popular culture, reality TV show singing may be described and evaluated as "good singing" by members of the public.…”

Musical Novices Are Unable to Judge Musical Quality from Brief Video Clips: A Failed Replication of Tsay (2014)

“…Mitchell and MacDonald [ 19 ] explored the importance of visual or audio priming in identifying music performers, and which cue is stronger. Musicians were assigned into either: visual-audio; V-A (watched the target performer then listened to a line-up of target and distractors), or audio-visual; A-V (opposite to visual-audio order) and guessed the target performer [ 19 ].…”

“…Mitchell and MacDonald [ 19 ] explored the importance of visual or audio priming in identifying music performers, and which cue is stronger. Musicians were assigned into either: visual-audio; V-A (watched the target performer then listened to a line-up of target and distractors), or audio-visual; A-V (opposite to visual-audio order) and guessed the target performer [ 19 ]. While all participants identified the target above chance level regardless of the presentation order and the number of distractors, V-A’s rates were significantly higher than A-V’s indicating that although both audio and visual cues provide enough info to achieve the task, the findings presumably arose from the visual cues being more robust information when identifying performers and people being more sensitive to them than auditory cues [ 19 ].…”