Music tech and data science professor Brian McFee recommends Vocals in Music Matter: The Relevance of Vocals in the Minds of Listeners by Andrew Demetriou, Andreas Jansson, Aparna Kumar, and Rachel M. Bittner, published in the 2018 ISMIR proceedings. Brian and Finn interview Andrew Demetriou about this research combining descriptions of music on Spotify and survey responses on what users pay attention to, like, and dislike in music generally and vocals specifically.
Time Stamps

[0:00:00] Introduction with Brian
[0:10:05] Interview: Introduction: Origins of paper and Survey 1 analysis
[0:20:15] Interview: Results of survey 1 and ethical research practices at Spotify
[0:27:03] Interview: Second Survey construction, analysis, and results
[0:34:37] Interview: Problems of terminology and labeling
[0:43:27] Interview: Overall results and absence of vocals terms in music descriptions
[0:53:30] Interview: Implications for everyday music listening
[0:58:40] Closing with Brian (12/10 for efficient summary)

Show notes

Recommended article:

Demetriou, A., Jansson, A., Kumar, A., & Bittner, R. M. Vocals in Music Matter: The Relevance of Vocals in the Minds of Listeners. Proceedings of ISMIR 2018 (pp. 514-520).
Slide deck from the corresponding ISMIR talk that caught Brian’s attention


Interviewee: Andrew Demetriou
Co-host: Prof. Brian McFee

And here is the action shot of the research team card sorting participants’ text responses to Survey 1.

Spotify researchers (left to right) Rachel Bittner, Andreas Jansson, Andrew Demetriou, and Aparna Kumar working through the text responses to Survey 1.
Credits
The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2018. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.