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# Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds

## Details

**Authors** Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, T. Ata Aydin, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann

**Year** 2026

**Publisher** Scientific Reports

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Music Theory

**Secondary disciplines** Psychology

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-54414-2) 
10.1038/s41598-026-54414-2

## In authors' words

### Abstract

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 sound evaluation is rather consistent, with a modest effect of listeners' perspective, stimulus duration, and repetition on music categorization. Listeners tend to agree in their ratings and three distinct categories emerged: music, not-music, and ambiguous sounds. Within the music cluster, listeners' evaluations of culturally diverse stimuli did not differ from the evaluations of genres more familiar to Western listeners. Although the three sound categories overlap in a low-level acoustic space, they were clearly separated by perceptual judgments—particularly the recognition of musical instruments, detection of melodies, and inference of intentionality. Such findings support the idea that 'music' is a distinct and stable perceptual construct encompassing a wide range of stimuli.

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To test whether 'music' functions as a distinct, stable perceptual category, separable from other sounds, across culturally diverse auditory stimuli.

### Who or what was studied (sample)

735 online Western participants, presented with musical excerpts from varied geographic origins and other auditory materials.

### How they did it (methods)

Preregistered online categorization experiments in which participants rated a wide range of auditory stimuli as music, not-music, or ambiguous, examining effects of listener perspective, stimulus duration, and repetition.

### What they found (results)

Listeners consistently sorted stimuli into three separable perceptual categories, music, not-music, and ambiguous sounds, that were clearly separated by perceptual judgments even though the categories overlapped in low-level acoustic space.

## Commentary

### In short

'Music' is a genuine, boundary-defined perceptual distinction rather than a graded or arbitrary label, holding independently of listeners' cultural familiarity with the stimuli.

**Patterns it shows** D

**Added** 2026-09-26

**How to cite this** Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, T. Ata Aydin, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann (2026). Music is a distinct perceptual category with subjective grounds. Scientific Reports.