Name:Pauline Larrouy-Maestri

School/Affiliation:Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany

Co-Authors:T. Ata Aydin & Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Abstract:

Music is an integral part of our daily lives, serving various functions. Recent research using a diverse set of stimuli, selected from multiple databases, revealed that listeners consistently identified certain audio clips as music but not others (Larrouy-Maestri & Wald-Fuhrmann, pre-registration). In this study, we investigate the factors that ground our perception of "music." To do so, 98 online participants were asked to rate the 90 stimuli previously examined, on a slider (0: not music – 100: music). Each stimulus was described in terms of its acoustic and perceptual characteristics. For the acoustic properties, we extracted 252 features using the Essentia toolbox. The perceptual characteristics were based on participants' evaluations of the stimuli on ten scales, focusing on different aspects: repetition, intentionality, instrumentality, complexity, melody, rhythm, tempo, pulse, harmony, and timbre. In essence, these perceptual characteristics reflect how listeners interpret the acoustic information. We first reduced both sets of features (acoustic and perceptual) into two meaningful dimensions through principal component analysis and used them as predictors of the music ratings in two separate mixed-effects models. The perceptual model outperformed the acoustic one, explaining more variance in music ratings (66.3% versus 26.4%) and yielding better fit criteria. This finding highlights the significant role of human interpretation of acoustic characteristics over the acoustic properties themselves in shaping listeners' perception of music.