  High-energy collisions in ALICE allow for the study of soft and hard QCD
particle production. The correlation between transverse momentum spectra and
event multiplicity is a sensitive observable providing insights into the
different production mechanisms. In these proceedings we report on this
observable for unidentified charged-particles, obtained using a 2d-unfolding
procedure. Particle production is compared at different collision energies, as
well as for pp, p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions at the same energy. In order to
understand the role of autocorrelations in small systems, it was proposed to
exploit the usage of the underlying event as a multiplicity estimator to
factorize the hardest and the softer components of the events. For this
purpose, in these proceedings the charged particle transverse momentum
distributions are also presented as a function of underlying-event activity in
pp collisions.
