Next, we need to discuss the possibility of a different interpretation. Throughout the experiment, listeners were asked to judge the overall pitch of the sounds and to ignore individual components that might pop out, i.e., listeners were encouraged to use a holistic rather than an analytical listening strategy. While we argue below that it is unlikely that listeners used an analytical listening strategy, we first consider whether, in principle, analytic listening could account for the present results. If, in test trials, listeners compared the individual mistuned component with the corresponding harmonic in the first interval, would performance be expected to deteriorate when that harmonic was substituted by a noise band in the context trials? The answer to this question is not obvious. If the noise band in the target frequency region popped out and led to increased segregation of the mistuned harmonic in the test trials, one might expect performance to improve rather than worsen. On the other hand, if subjects tried to focus on the frequency region of the mistuned harmonic, the change from a mistuned tonal component to a noise might be distracting and might make it harder to tune into the specific target pitch.