Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper discusses an experiment conducted with two groups of participants, composed of musicians and non-musicians, in order to investigate the impact that the speed of a sound sequence and the interval size which selected sounds are played on the grouping of sounds into perceptual streams. Significant differences were observed between musicians and non-musicians with respect to the threshold sequence speed at which the sequence was split into two streams. In modern psychoacoustic studies, the qualifying criteria for listeners usually include otologically normal hearing (verified by audiometric test) and age. The differences in the results for the two groups suggest that the musical background of the participating listeners may be a vital factor. The criterion of musical education should be taken into account during experiments so that the results obtained are reliable, uniform and free from interpretive errors.