Predictive Timing in Speech and Music Production

The project tests musicians and non-musicians with auditory feedback perturbation paradigms in speech and music. In auditory feedback perturbation studies, speakers speak or sing a sequence into a microphone and hear their own productions via special in-ear headphones, while specific parameters in the feedback signal are altered in real-time. In the two speech conditions, parts of the spoken signal are temporally altered in the auditory feedback, hence stretched or compressed. The music conditions focally alter either pitch in a sung sequence or the rhythm in the same sequence. Responses to the speech and music conditions will be analyzed, and the comparison between the group of musicians and non-musicians will give insight into common underlying mechanisms in music and speech production and how musical training shapes the feedback-feedforward loop in music and speech production. Additionally, the participants will perform rhythmic finger-tapping tasks to assess their general motor stability, and their auditory acuity (perceptual ability) will be evaluated with adaptive staircase perception tasks. We expect musicians to be more sensitive to the shifts in general and to show faster responses; however, since we expect them to have a more stable representation of the predicted outcome.

Faculty Supervisor:

Simone Falk

Student:

Partner:

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Education

University:

Université de Montréal

Program: