Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds (opens in new tab)

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 sou...