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Remembering, Recognizing and Describing Singers'

Sound Identities
a b
Helen F. Mitchell & Raymond A.R. MacDonald
a
University of Sydney, Australia
b
Glasgow Caledonian University, UK

Available online: 31 Mar 2011

To cite this article: Helen F. Mitchell & Raymond A.R. MacDonald (2011): Remembering, Recognizing and Describing Singers'
Sound Identities, Journal of New Music Research, 40:1, 75-80

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 Journal of New Music Research
2011, Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 75–80
Remembering, Recognizing and Describing Singers’ Sound Identities
Helen F. Mitchell1 and Raymond A.R. MacDonald2
1
University of Sydney, Australia; 2Glasgow Caledonian University, UK
Abstract
Perceiving music performers through sound quality is
important for musicians, teachers and every music
Downloaded by [41.235.172.98] at 11:51 10 July 2011
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 ¼ 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 ¼ 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’ con-
fidence 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.
Correspondence: Helen F. Mitchell, Conservatorium of Music C41, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia.
E-mail: helen.mitchell@sydney.edu.au
DOI: 10.1080/09298215.2010.545130 Ó 2011 Taylor & Francis
1. Introduction
Perception of individual music performers’ sound quality
requires a complex synthesis of sensory information. A
performer’s musical identity is influenced by his or her
‘sound’ (MacDonald, Miell, & Hargreaves, 2002) and
listeners take for granted not only their capacity to
distinguish between musical instruments, but also their
ability to discriminate between performers playing the
same instrument by their sound alone. Despite the
importance of this auditory perception, little is known
about how listeners discriminate between, recognize and
verbalize different sound qualities as listeners use a limited
selection of descriptors to explain how they process sound
(Davidson & Coimbra, 2001; Mitchell & Kenny, 2008).
Perceptions of auditory experiences in music remains a
largely intuitive process and listeners are rarely asked to
define or describe their mental processing of sound
(Stanley, Brooker, & Gilbert, 2002). Can listeners recog-
nize individual music performers from a group of like
performers? Do words adequately capture their impres-
sions of the sound quality? Or do verbal descriptions
interfere with listeners’ sound recall of specific performers?
This study aims to provide an insight into the way auditory
experts, such as musicians, identify and articulate indivi-
dual singers’ voices. It will investigate if verbal descriptors
are an imperfect intermediary in the communication of a
performer’s sound and if words actually distort musicians’
memory and recall of an individual performer.
1.1 Verbal overshadowing
A verbal overshadowing (VO) effect can occur when we
use words to describe sensory experiences. Verbal
 76 Helen F. Mitchell and Raymond A.R. MacDonald
description, or verbal encoding, impairs later recall of the
experience and individuals are less able to identify the
stimuli from a line-up (Schooler, Fiore, & Brandimonte,
1997; Parr, Heatherbell, & White, 2002; Perfect, Hunt, &
Harris, 2002). VO has been most apparent in face
recognition, where witnesses to crimes have to describe
the perpetrator of a robbery in detail, and later select
their face from a photographic line-up. The act of verbal
description negatively influences individuals’ ability to
recognize the face they described in words. Empirical
studies have confirmed this VO effect in facial recogni-
tion by comparing verbal description groups with
memory-only control groups (Meissner & Brigham,
2001). More recent studies have demonstrated the same
distortion effect in the auditory domain. Listeners’ ability
to recognize spoken voices following verbal description
diminished while no-description control groups were able
to isolate the voice from a line-up (Perfect et al., 2002;
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Vanags, Carroll, & Perfect, 2005). Our preliminary
investigations of singing voice recognition followed the
same responses as the spoken voice studies and suggested
that music listeners may be similarly susceptible to the
effects of VO when they describe singing voices (Mitchell
& MacDonald, 2009).
1.2 Verbalizing sound quality in the music domain
In music, the auditory modality of the stimuli does not
match the task (verbal description), yet we rely on verbal
descriptors to explain and communicate our perception
of sound quality in training and assessment. Singing
voice assessors have used a limited selection of verbal
descriptors to describe the voices and focused on the
more easily verbalized technical and performance com-
ponents rather than describing overall quality (Davidson
& Coimbra, 2001; Stanley et al., 2002; Kenny & Mitchell,
2006; Mitchell & Kenny, 2008). Examiners have even
noted candidates’ dress and stage manner to facilitate
later recall of individual singers’ performances for
discussion and assessment, at the expense of describing
sound quality (Davidson & Coimbra, 2001). This
provides one potential clue to suggest the use of language
may hinder the recall of performers and performances.
There is an expectation that music listeners have a
superior ability to discriminate between, recognize and
verbalize different sound qualities. Musicians are gen-
erally more proficient in object (musical instrument or
voice) recognition (e.g. Chartrand & Belin, 2006) but are
also surprisingly unreliable in recognizing the same
instrument or singer performing notes even an octave
apart (Handel & Erickson, 2001, 2004; Erickson & Perry,
2003). Conceptualizing an individual performer’s sound
is complex, as it contains multiple acoustic properties as
well as musical, technical and aesthetic cues, all of which
contribute to the overall ‘sound quality’ (Handel, 2006).
Even trained professionals find it hard to agree on precise
descriptions of sound quality in singers (e.g. Ekholm,
Papagiannis, & Chagnon, 1998; Garnier, Henrich,
Castellengo, Sotiropoulos, & Dubois, 2007) far less
how listeners construct and perceive an individual
singer’s sound. Communication about performers usual-
ly focuses on the most easily verbalized characteristics in
the sound rather than individual composition of these
characteristics which makes a sound unique (Kenny &
Mitchell, 2006; Mitchell & Kenny, 2006).
Verbalizing sound quality presents a challenge to
musicians and pedagogues in describing a complex
sensory phenomenon. Verbal description may be an
imperfect means to convey sound, but talking about
music represents an important part of musical commu-
nication (MacDonald, Miell, & Wilson, 2005) and assists
listeners in describing and constructing musical processes
(MacDonald & Wilson, 2006). It also influences how we
hear and perform music (Hargreaves, MacDonald, &
Miell, in press). The perception of music does not usually
depend on a fixed semantic interpretation (Peretz &
Zatorre, 2005; Schneck & Berger, 2006) although
associative memories with sound may form the basis of
semantic preparation for recall or subsequent recognition
(Koelsch et al., 2004). This study will extend current
knowledge on mental processing of auditory information
to a music performance context.
1.3 Project aims
Current knowledge about ‘sound’ evaluation of music
performers must extend beyond intuition, and requires a
more rigorous approach to demystify the perceptual
processes of audiences and evaluators. While there is a
growing body of knowledge focused on categorizing
terminology used to describe sound quality, there is still
much to be learned about the value of verbalization in
characterizing listeners’ perceptions of music performers.
Verbal descriptions may only be effective when a
performer’s sound translates easily and completely into
words. The aim of the current project is to investigate the
way in which auditory experts, such as musicians,
identify and articulate individual singers’ sound quality
and to discover if verbalizing that sound distorts
subsequent memory and identification of the singer.
2. Method
2.1 Participants
2.1.1 Singers
Six soprano singers studying classical singing at the
Sydney Conservatorium of Music (SCM) volunteered to
take part. They were informed that the study was
 Remembering, recognizing and describing singers’ sound identities 77

investigating the way listeners use words to describe and
remember a music performance.
2.1.2 Listeners
Listeners (n ¼ 50) were aged between 20 and 66 (M ¼ 36
years). Participants were sent information about the
project and were invited to take part in a perceptual
study investigating the possible effect of visual and verbal
stimuli on listeners’ ability to recall a music performance.
They were required to attend a single listening session
lasting around 25 min and to complete a short
questionnaire about their musical performance instru-
ments and teaching experience and basic demographic
information.
Forty-four listeners currently played one or more
musical instruments/voice and of these, 25 were taking
lessons on their principal instrument and 26 currently
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2.3 Perceptual test
2.3.1 Stimuli
Audio files were edited and consisted of around 15 s
extracts of each singer for each song. Each extract was a
complete musical phrase, and included bars 5 to 12 of
Caro mio ben or bars 13 to 28 of Seligkeit. Target voice
CDs were prepared for each singer singing Caro mio ben
(first take) and a single line-up CD of six singers singing
Seligkeit (first take).
2.3.2 Procedure
Listeners were asked to attend a single listening session
and were informed that the purpose of the study was to
investigate the effect of visual and verbal tasks on the
ability to recognize aural stimuli. Audio samples were
played from a CD player (Sony DEJ885W) via circum-

taught a musical instrument. Table 1 shows the demo-
graphic profile of the listener cohort, including gender,
age and principal instrument played.
2.2 Singer Protocol
Singers were required to attend a single recording session
and perform unaccompanied excerpts of Caro mio ben
(Caccini) and Seligkeit (Schubert), twice for a recording.
They were presented with a starting note, and a
metronome beat before starting each song.
Singers were recorded in a sound treated studio at
SCM using a matched pair of stereo microphones (Neu-
mann KU100, ORTF configuration) 2.75 m from the
singer. The level was kept constant via a pre-amplifier with
stepped controls and the audio channels were digitized,
transferred to computer and saved as wave files (24 bit,
48 kHz).
aural closed-back stereo monitoring headphones (Senn-
heiser HD 270) in a quiet room to ensure that each
listener heard the same quality of sample. Listener
participants were assigned to one of two groups; a verbal
description group or a non-description control group in
order as they arrived to take the perceptual test.
Figure 1 illustrates the project tasks for each group.
All listeners were presented with a short sample of a
single singer performing Caro mio ben (for encoding) on
CD. Target voice presentation was randomized from the
six singers. Listeners were then asked to perform a visual
maze task on paper (a filler-task) for 10 min. In the next
five minutes, the verbal description group was asked to
write a detailed description of the voice they heard at the
start of the test while the control group completed an
anagram puzzle. Finally, both groups were presented a
line-up of six voices singing Seligkeit and were asked to
identify the original voice they heard and to rate their

Table 1. Listeners’ demographic profiles by experimental group,

including age, gender and principal instruments played.

Experimental group

Verbal (n ¼ 25) Control (n ¼ 25)

Mean age (SD) 35.1 (10.1) 33.9 (12.2)

Gender
Female 10 12
Male 15 13
Principal instrument
Voice 6 (24%) 4 (16%)
Keyboard 4 (16%) 4 (16%)
Woodwind 5 (20%) 8 (32%)
Brass 2 (8%) 0 –
Percussion 0 – 2 (8%) Fig. 1. Listener tasks by group (verbal description versus
control).
 78 Helen F. Mitchell and Raymond A.R. MacDonald

confidence in their response on a scale of 1–10 (not
confident to very confident).
3. Results
Listeners’ responses were initially examined for the total
number of correct voice identifications from the line-up
(Table 2). The outcome measure was a single result
(correct, incorrect) and the group designation (verbal
description versus control group) was tested as an
independent predictor of verbal overshadowing. Data
were entered into a binary logistic regression to see if
verbal overshadowing predicted line-up identification
success. There was a reliable verbal overshadowing effect,
W(1) ¼ 3.81, p ¼ 0.05 and verbally describing the singing
voice led to poorer identification performance (24%
correct) than the control group (48% correct). Overall,
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darker sound than for soprano’ or ‘The voice sounded
fairly low pitched for a female’.
Listeners debated the singer’s age, from a ‘young
singer in her 20s’ to a ‘mature female’ or ‘a woman over
the age of 40 as the voice sounded ‘‘mature’’’.
Vibrato was a key feature in the target voices, and 15
listeners mentioned its presence or absence, and re-
marked on its quality. For example:
‘Smooth even vibrato on long notes but none on shorter
notes’;
‘The vibrato added warmth to the tone ensuring it was not
harsh on the ears’;
‘Vibrato quite nondescript (ordinary, unchanging)’.
Fifteen listeners mentioned the singer’s diction or

only 18 of 50 listeners correctly identified their target articulation of language and would say things like:
voice from the line-up (37%).
‘Good diction’;

3.1 Confidence scores

Table 2 also shows listeners’ confidence scores in their
target voice selections. Mean scores were similar for
verbal description (M ¼ 5.2, SD ¼ 2.3) and control
groups (M ¼ 5.5, SD ¼ 2.3). There was no significant
difference between the two groups’ scores and listeners
were unaware of the effect of their tasks on their ability
to recognize the target voice.
3.2 Verbal descriptions
The 25 listeners in the verbal group were instructed to
focus on the characteristics of the voice singing the target
song, rather than the song the singer sang when writing
their description of the voice. Most listeners identified
that the singer was a soprano, or that she was female.
Some listeners debated whether their target singer might
be a mezzo soprano, with comments such as ‘Slightly
‘The articulation of the words was extremely clear’;
‘Italian, not very clear pronunciation – couldn’t understand
language until 4th word’;
‘ . . . the singer is obviously not an Italian’.
The majority of listeners used generic terms usually
associated with the classical singing voice to describe the
quality of the voice such as ‘rich and warm’, ‘breathy’,
‘clear and pure’, ‘bright’ while others used technical
descriptors like ‘support’ and ‘projection’. For two
listeners, the sound they heard evoked a mental picture
of the target voice singing, for example:
‘English accent/Anglo-Saxon, blonde, quite tall’;
‘Image evoked based on sound: larger brunette female . . .
solid, fairly tall’.

Table 2. Correct responses and mean confidence scores for all

listeners and for each experimental group (verbal description
versus control).
4. Discussion
The aim of this study was to investigate the way in which
Mean listeners process individual singers’ sound quality. It
Experimental Correct % of correct confidence tested if verbal description influenced listeners’ mental
group responses responses scores (SD) representations of a performers’ idiosyncratic sound. It
investigated the impact of the verbal overshadowing
Verbal 6 24% 5.2 (2.3) (VO) phenomenon when listeners attempt to put these
(n ¼ 25 )
sound experiences into words. There was a reliable VO
Control 12 48% 5.5 (2.3)
(n ¼ 25 )
effect for singing voice recognition, where listeners had to
Total sample 18 37% 5.5 (2.3) identify a singer in a line-up singing different musical
(n ¼ 50 ) stimuli. Verbalizing their perceptions of the singer
reduced listeners’ likelihood of identifying her from a
 Remembering, recognizing and describing singers’ sound identities
line-up of similar singers, compared to listeners who did
not describe her voice. Verbalization did not affect
listeners’ confidence ratings about their decision and
listeners were essentially unaware that verbalizing their
perception of the target singer distorted their memory of
the sound and reduced their ability to successfully
identify her singing a new song in the line-up.
The VO phenomenon has been evident in face, taste
and spoken voice recognition and perception of music
performance requires a comparable complex synthesis of
auditory information. The target voice and line-up parade
structure mimicked visual and auditory recognition
experimental designs; the results here follow both auditory
studies’ reliable VO effect, where listeners heard a repeat
of the same sentence (Perfect et al., 2002), or a different
sentence at line-up (Vanags et al., 2005). The complex task
structure, using a different song at line-up, was based on
the premise that musicians are equipped with advanced
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listening skills and aimed to focus listeners’ attention to
the individual sounds qualities, rather than the execution
of a repeated task (Perfect et al., 2002).
The available studies of VO in auditory recognition
have not discussed the specific use of language (Perfect
et al., 2002; Vanags et al., 2005) but for music studies this
presents one of the most important components of a
study. Listeners’ descriptions of these target voices
illustrated the limits of language to communicate their
perception of music performers. Generic terms used to
describe the target voices were essentially uninformative
and not useful in capturing the unique configuration of
sound qualities in an individual voice (Ekholm et al.,
1998; Garnier et al., 2007). Listeners found verbalization
of the target voice an unusual challenge and resorted to
descriptions of the song, or even the person they
imagined singing, rather than focus on the auditory-only
features of the sound. Listeners not only lacked the
vocabulary to verbalize subtle sound differences but also
inherently limited their memories of unique sound
qualities through their use of vocabulary. The existing
evidence from singing performance evaluation suggests
that music listeners find vocal quality difficult to
articulate and often avoid explicit descriptions to
elucidate their intuitive assessments of the overall sound
(Davidson & Coimbra, 2001; Kenny & Mitchell, 2006;
Mitchell & Kenny, 2008). It may be that listeners lack the
semantic framework to define unique sound qualities or
that verbalization is an inadequate means to capture
mental impressions of singers’ sound. This provides a
crucial area for future research to develop our under-
standing of music perception. Subsequent studies must
ascertain if enhancing perceptual and semantic knowl-
edge through advanced training removes the VO effect
or, if the VO effect remains regardless of the aural acuity
and linguistic skills of the listeners.
Awareness of suitable verbal descriptors or prototypes
may offer listeners a more effective lexicon for sound
79
description. However, a study involving wine tasting
suggested that perceptual skills are not automatically
enhanced or assured by linguistic knowledge. Expert
wine-tasters were more likely than novices to recognize
odours by their verbal labels, but all had knowledge of
language used to describe wine (Parr et al., 2002).
Novices may have lacked the ability to separate
perceptual and linguistic skills while experts’ superior
perceptual skills protected them from linguistic inter-
ference to taste recognition. The ability to recognize an
object, (e.g. a face) is achieved in its totality rather than
the sum of its features.
Musical listeners in this study were unaware that
verbalizing sound quality affected their evaluation of the
singer line-up. Listeners’ confidence scores were remark-
ably similar (verbal M ¼ 5.2, control M ¼ 5.5) and
indicated that listeners in the experimental group did
not view verbalization as problematic to their recognition
performance. If listeners had been aware of the negative
effects of their description, confidence scores may have
reflected this and been lower than those of the control
group. It seems that these specialist listeners were also
oblivious to the potential hazards of verbalizing vocal
quality (Perfect et al., 2002).
5. Conclusions
These findings present a challenge for musicians,
pedagogues and for every music listener. As in both the
spoken voice VO studies (Perfect et al., 2002; Vanags
et al., 2005), all listeners’ likelihood of recognizing the
target performer from the line-up was below 40%,
regardless of task (verbal description/control) from the
line-up presentation. While a low recognition rate may be
expected from average auditory audiences (such as
psychology class students taking part in experiments
for course credit), musicians and musicians in training
are expected to demonstrate expert auditory skills to
interpret music performances, and the unique sound of
music performers. Over half of the control group, who
just processed and remembered the singer’s sound were
unable to recognize her at line-up. This has profound
implications for the way in which we consider unique
sound of music performers and how audiences recognize,
process and describe a performer’s sound. How do we
process and conceptualize an individual’s sound quality?
5.1 Implications for the music domain
The results are pertinent to studies of auditory
cognition as they demonstrate some complexities in
translating information from one perceptual domain to
another. More specifically this work suggests that even
experienced music listeners are vulnerable to the VO
effect when they assess performers. Verbalization does
 80 Helen F. Mitchell and Raymond A.R. MacDonald
not adequately capture listeners’ auditory experiences
and may explain why music examiners and auditioners
avoid describing singing voices in more than the broadest
terms (Davidson & Coimbra, 2001; Mitchell & Kenny,
2008). Future research must seek to understand in more
detail how listeners process and describe individual
musicians’ sound and develop new ways to evaluate
listeners’ mental representations of sound.
Acknowledgements
The first author was funded by an Early Career
Researcher Grant from the Conservatorium of Music,
University of Sydney. Sincere thanks to the singers and
listeners who took part in this study.
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