Auditory Cue-weighting in BaYaka Forest-Foragers and Western Listeners

Music recognition depends on both spectral and temporal information, but how listeners weight these cues across cultures remains poorly understood. Here, we tested cue weighting among Mbendjele BaYaka forest foragers and Western listeners. Across three experiments using TuneTwins, a tablet-based auditory matching-pairs paradigm, spectral degradation impaired Western listeners’ performance for both familiar and unfamiliar music, whereas recognition of familiar music was largely preserved in BaYaka listeners. Temporal degradation, by contrast, impaired all groups except Western listeners tested on familiar music. Our findings suggest that music recognition can be supported by multiple acoustic cues, that familiarity shapes listeners’ resilience to acoustic degradation, and that the weighting of spectral and temporal information varies across populations. Together, these results challenge the assumption that pitch is the dominant cue for music recognition. In addition, the study illustrates how field-compatible, game-based paradigms can facilitate rigorous cognitive research in populations that remain largely absent from experimental music cognition.