"The role of noise in facilitating the identification of tunes with missing notes"
Justin Aronoff, University of Southern California
Abstract:
Listening environments are typically noisy, with background noise often masking part of the foreground. Despite these disruptions, listeners have an extraordinary ability to perceive and understand speech and music in noisy environments. One of the mechanisms that facilitates perception in noise is auditory restoration, where background noise perceptually fills in missing information from the foreground, facilitating identification.
Research on this increase in identification has previously been restricted to speech (where it is referred to as phoneme restoration). By training participants to associate brief musical tunes with arbitrary shapes, my research has demonstrated that background noise can also facilitate the identification of disrupted music. Additionally, this work provides evidence that the increased identification with noise results from a change in the similarity relationship between the disrupted tune and the learned tunes.