KateI have collected data from 60 participants over the last two days, and the preliminary data analysis looks really good. Overall, participants are performing as hypothesized or better. I suspected that the study I am basing this study on underestimated the ability of people without musical training to do this task (or a similar one), and it appears that I was right! They’re doing even better than I expected.
This experiment is looking at how many instruments people can count when they are playing together—for example, if listening to a recording of a string quartet, how well can people tell if it is 1, 2, 3, or 4 instruments playing at any given moment, and how readily can they identify when the number changes (one or more start or stop). My musical examples go up to 5 instruments (or musical “voices”). The hypothesis is that trained musicians would be able to identify 1-3 quite well, and then that accuracy and ability to identify changes would go down fairly rapidly with textures of more than 3 voices, and that people without musical training would perform less well than those with musical training.
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱Goodness. This is a rabbit-hole I'm going to have to jump down later. I played in the school orchestra as a kid, and was a chorister (2nd bass) for several years in later life.
I think 'how many voices' will turn out to be a 'hard' problem!