13:30 - 15:00
Talk Session II
+
13:30 - 15:00
Mon-HS1-Talk II-
Mon-Talk II-
Room: HS1
Chair/s:
Maria Manolika, Barbara E. Marschallek, Thomas Jacobsen
With the publication of Gustav Theodor Fechner’s Vorschule der Ästhetik, the year 1876 marks the beginning of Experimental Aesthetics, which is the second-oldest branch of Experimental Psychology. In his major work, Fechner suggested the study of aesthetics "from below", applying empirical knowledge. To date, the Experimental Aesthetics enjoys a growing number of researches from different fields of Psychology. The present symposia, therefore, comprise contributions investigating a variety of domains including, for example, live performances, materials, and tattoos, Furthermore, questions of the influence of several stimuli’s and individual’s characteristics, including but not
limited to complexity, memory resources, personality differences, and types of stimuli, are addressed.
What grounds singing voice preferences?
Mon-HS1-Talk II-01
Presented by: Camila Bruder
Camila Bruder 1, Pauline Larrouy-Maestri 1, 2
1 Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2 Max Planck-NYU Center for Language, Music, and Emotion (CLaME), USA & Germany
In the visual domain, the relative contribution of object features and viewers' idiosyncrasies to aesthetic judgments is often discussed. In a recent study, we focused on singing performances and examined the contribution of attributes of the voice signal to listeners' liking of pop performances. Concretely, we asked participants to report how much they liked melodies (a cappella excerpts of “Don’t worry, be happy” and “Over the rainbow”), performed by highly trained female singers. The material was also described in terms of various perceptual features (e.g., vibrato, articulation, tempo etc.) by the same participants and acoustically analysed (e.g., fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, etc.). Results indicate that liking can be predicted by perceptual features of the voices (which account for 44% of the variance in liking ratings), but not by their acoustic features. To generalize our findings, we recently constructed a dataset of human vocalizations, consisting of recordings of 22 singers performing six melodies in three different singing styles (as a lullaby, as a pop song, as an opera aria). The dataset has been validated in a forced-choice lab experiment where lay listeners (N = 25 for each stimulus) could discriminate if stimuli sounded as a lullaby, a pop song or an opera aria with mean accuracy higher than 75% for all three singing styles. By using this rich new stimulus dataset in listening experiments, we are currently exploring listeners’ singing voice preferences in a wider context and ultimately drawing a parallel between the visual and auditory domains.
Keywords: aesthetics, liking, acoustics, singing voice, preferences