Remembering, Recognizing and Describing Singers' Sound Identities

Perceiving music performers through sound quality is important for musicians, teachers and every music listener. A performer's musical identity is influenced by the unique sound they create, yet little is known about listeners' mental representation of an individual's sound quality. A verbal overshadowing (VO) effect has been extensively reported in visual recognition, where the act of verbal description distorts subsequent recall, and the same may apply in the auditory domain and specifically, in music performance reception. In this study we explore if musicians also exhibit a VO effect, by investigating how listeners form auditory impressions of a singer and testing the impact of verbal description on listeners' recognition accuracy and confidence. Listeners (n = 50) heard a single target voice and were assigned to either a verbal description group or a control group. The verbal group wrote a detailed description of the target voice and the control group did not. All listeners heard a voice line-up (n = 6) and were asked to identify the original target voice and rate their confidence in the decision. There was a reliable VO effect where providing a verbal description reduced listeners' identification accuracy of the target voice, but did not reduce listeners' confidence rating of their decision. Verbalization of singing voices was an inadequate representation of listeners' auditory experience and limited listeners' ability to recall and identify singers' sound quality. These results have profound implications for the way in which we consider musical performance and how music listeners recognize, process and describe a performer's sound.