Honing, H. & Ladinig, O. (2006) The effect of exposure and expertise on timing judgments: Preliminary results. Proceedings of the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (pp. 80-85). Bologna: Italy

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that experienced listeners can distinguish between an unaltered and a tempo-transformed audio recording by focusing on the expressive timing used by the performer. This was interpreted as evidence for the tempo-specific timing hypothesis (Honing, 2006). This study tries to disentangle the various factors that might have contributed to this result, including familiarity with a musical genre, musical background and expertise. The preliminary results (N=151) suggest that familiarity with a specific genre (listeners' exposure) has a significant effect on discriminating a real from a tempo-transformed performance, while formal musical training (listeners' expertise) does not have such an effect. These results are taken as further evidence for the sensitivity of listeners to timing deviations in music performance and that these are more likely enhanced by exposure through active listening than by formal musical training.