Seeing a singer helps comprehension of the song's lyrics
When listening to speech, we often benefit when also seeing the speaker talk. If this benefit is not domain-specific for speech, then the recognition of sung lyrics should
likewise benefit from seeing the singer. Nevertheless, previous research failed to obtain a substantial improvement in that domain. Our study shows that this failure was not due to
inherent differences between singing and speaking but rather to less informative visual presentations. By presenting a professional singer, we found a substantial audiovisual
benefit of about 35% improvement for lyrics recognition. This benefit was further robust across participants, phrases, and repetition of the test materials. Our results provide the
first evidence that lyrics recognition just like speech and music perception is a multimodal process.
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