Comparison of good versus bad tone quality/intonation of vocal and string performances: Issues concerning measurement and reliability of the continuous response digital interface

The purpose of this research was twofold: to investigate patterns of music listening among music majors regarding accompanied/unaccompanied excerpts v arying in tone quality and intonation, and to investigate the reliability o f the Continuous Response Digital Interface(CRDI). Present studies were the third and fourth in a series and were designed to replicate and extend pre vious studies that determine whether listeners demonstrate consistent liste ning patterns to musical excerpts intentionally structured to be perceived as "good" and "bad." Excerpts consisted of the first and second phrases of Schubert's and Gounod's "Ave Maria" performed by a soprano, tenor, violinis t, and cellist with and without piano accompaniment. Results of the present investigations indicated that subjects (N=80 in each study) easily discriminated between the good and bad examples when focusin g on both tone quality and intonation using a paper and pencil Likert-type( 1-5) scale. There was also no significant difference between ratings for th e accompanied versus the unaccompanied selections. Mean ratings were very s imilar to results found in the two previous studies. The correlation betwee n the third replication with previous responses from subjects in studies on e and two who responded either to intonation only or to tone quality only w as .977 and .945 respectively. Additionally, spectrographic and other acous tical analyses of each rendition indicated that subjects responded differen tially to the various excerpts with each example being perceived idiosyncra tically within its own musical context.