The High-Voice Superiority Effect in Polyphonic Music Is Influenced by Experience: A Comparison of Musicians Who Play Soprano-Range Compared With Bass-Range Instruments

Western polyphonic music is typically composed of multiple simultaneous melodic lines of equal importance, referred to as “voices.” Previous studies have shown that adult nonmusicians are able to encode each voice in separate parallel sensory memory traces during passive listening. Specifically, when presented with sequences composed of two simultaneous voices (melodies), listeners show mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch changes in …