Empirically Weighting the Importance of Decision Factors for Singing Preference

Michael Barone, Karim Ibrahim, Chitralekha Gupta, Ye Wang
2018 Zenodo  
Although music cognition and music information retrieval have many common areas of research interest, relatively little work utilizes a combination of signal- and humancentric approaches when assessing complex cognitive phenomena. This work explores the importance of four cognitive decision-making factors (familiarity, genre preference, ease of vocal reproducibility, and overall preference) influence in the perception of "singability", how attractive a song is to sing. In Experiment One, we
more » ... lop a model to validate and empirically determine to what degree these factors are important when evaluating its singability. Results indicate that evaluations of how these four factors impact singability strongly correlate with pairwise evaluations (ρ = 0.692, p < 0.0001), supporting the notion that singability is a measurable cognitive process. Experiment Two examines the degree to which timbral and rhythmic features contribute to singability. Regression and random forest analysis find that some selected features are more significant than others. We discuss the method we use to empirically assess the complex decisions, and provide a preliminary exploration regarding what acoustic features may motivate these choices.
doi:10.5281/zenodo.1492468 fatcat:cwvtkyubyrh6zkpe2j6ilx5br4