Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds

Abstract

Abstract Making sense of our auditory environments involves forming meaningful perceptual categories. While ‘music’ is culturally diverse, Western listeners seem to consistently distinguish it from other sounds. In preregistered experiments, we examined the identification of sounds as music by presenting a large range of stimuli—musical excerpts from different geographical origins and a variety of other auditory materials—to a total of 735 online Western participants. Our findings demonstrate that sound evaluation is rather consistent, with a modest effect of listeners’ perspective, stimulus duration, and repetition on music categorization. Listeners tend to agree in their ratings and three distinct categories emerged: music, not-music, and ambiguous sounds. Within the music cluster, listeners’ evaluations of culturally diverse stimuli did not differ from the evaluations of genres more familiar to Western listeners. Although the three sound categories overlap in a low-level acoustic space, they were clearly separated by perceptual judgments—particularly the recognition of musical instruments, detection of melodies, and inference of intentionality. Such findings support the idea that ‘music’ is a distinct and stable perceptual construct encompassing a wide range of stimuli.