The perception of musical timbre1 CHAPTER 7 (original) (raw)
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The Perception of Musical Timbre
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
CHAPTER 7 T IMBRE is a misleadingly simple and vague word encompassing a very complex set of auditory attributes, as well as a plethora of psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, duration, and various environmental characteristics such as room reverberation. This leaves a wealth of possibilities that have been explored over the last 40 years or so. We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (1) it is a multifarious set of abstract sensory attributes, some of which are continuously varying (e.g. attack sharpness, brightness, nasality, richness), others of which are discrete or categorical (e.g., the 'blatt' at the beginning of a sforzando trombone sound or the pinched offset of a harpsichord sound), and (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identifi cation, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells), and thus involves the absolute categorization of a sound . The psychological approach to timbre has also included work on the musical implications of timbre as a set of formbearing dimensions in music ).
The Notion of Timbre Space 2 . 1 Continuous Perceptual Dimensions
2016
Timbre, in contrast to pitch and loudness, remains a poorly understood auditory attribute. Persons attempting to understand it may be confused as much by its nature as its definition. Indeed, timbre is a “strange and multiple” attribute of sound (Cadoz, 1991, p. 17), defined by what it is not: it is neither pitch, nor loudness, nor duration. Consider the definition proposed by the American National Standards Institute (1973, p. 56): “Timbre is that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a subject can judge that two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar.” Therefore, timbre is that perceptual attribute by which we can distinguish the instruments of the orchestra even if they play the same note with the same dynamics. The absence of a satisfactory definition of timbre is primarily due to two major problems. The first one concerns the multidimensional nature of timbre. Indeed, it is timbre’s “strangeness” and, even more, its “multipl...
To appear in Ergo, 2023
Along with pitch and loudness, timbre is commonly described as an audible property of sounds. This paper puts forward an alternative view - that timbres are properties of auditory media. This approach has many advantages. First, it accounts for the frequent attribution of timbres to objects that do not have characteristic sounds. Second, it explains why timbres are attributed not only to ordinary objects, like musical instruments, but also to surrounding spaces and architectural structures. And finally, it provides an original solution to the timbre-constancy problem.
Acoustic structure of the five perceptual dimensions of timbre in orchestral instrument tones
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013
Attempts to relate the perceptual dimensions of timbre to quantitative acoustical dimensions have been tenuous, leading to claims that timbre is an emergent property, if measurable at all. Here, a three-pronged analysis shows that the timbre space of sustained instrument tones occupies 5 dimensions and that a specific combination of acoustic properties uniquely determines gestalt perception of timbre. Firstly, multidimensional scaling (MDS) of dissimilarity judgments generated a perceptual timbre space in which 5 dimensions were cross-validated and selected by traditional model comparisons. Secondly, subjects rated tones on semantic scales. A discriminant function analysis (DFA) accounting for variance of these semantic ratings across instruments and between subjects also yielded 5 significant dimensions with similar stimulus ordination. The dimensions of timbre space were then interpreted semantically by rotational and reflectional projection of the MDS solution into two DFA dimensions. Thirdly, to relate this final space to acoustical structure, the perceptual MDS coordinates of each sound were regressed with its joint spectrotemporal modulation power spectrum. Sound structures correlated significantly with distances in perceptual timbre space. Contrary to previous studies, most perceptual timbre dimensions are not the result of purely temporal or spectral features but instead depend on signature spectrotemporal patterns.
Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology
2008
CHAPTER 7 T IMBRE is a misleadingly simple and vague word encompassing a very complex set of auditory attributes, as well as a plethora of psychological and musical issues. It covers many parameters of perception that are not accounted for by pitch, loudness, spatial position, duration, and various environmental characteristics such as room reverberation. This leaves a wealth of possibilities that have been explored over the last 40 years or so. We now understand timbre to have two broad characteristics that contribute to the perception of music: (1) it is a multifarious set of abstract sensory attributes, some of which are continuously varying (e.g. attack sharpness, brightness, nasality, richness), others of which are discrete or categorical (e.g., the 'blatt' at the beginning of a sforzando trombone sound or the pinched offset of a harpsichord sound), and (2) it is one of the primary perceptual vehicles for the recognition, identifi cation, and tracking over time of a sound source (singer's voice, clarinet, set of carillon bells), and thus involves the absolute categorization of a sound . The psychological approach to timbre has also included work on the musical implications of timbre as a set of formbearing dimensions in music ).
An investigation of musical timbre
Journal de physique, 1994
Musical timbre is a particularly difficult attribute to measure and quantify. However, Pollard and Janson (1982) C31 have successfully plotted the changing timbre of the starting transient and steady state of a single note. Following on from their work, the changing timbre of an ensemble piece of music i s graphed using just two in* pendent-parameters, these being derived from Stevens (1971) C41, Mark VII.
Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale, 1997
The perceptual correlates of acoustic parameters involved in musical timbre were investigated by examining judgements of timbre dissimilarity. Nine synthetic sounds were created, derived from crossing three levels of spectral and temporal parameters (number of harmonics and rise time, respectively). Two separate conditions were tested, one using single tones, the other using short melodies. Fifteen musically untrained subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli and asked to judge dissimilarity on an 8point scale. The spatial configuration resulting from multidimensional analysis of the data was best fit by a threedimensional model, with the first two dimensions accounting for most of the variance. The perceptual space derived from the analysis indicates that these two orthogonal dimensions corresponded closely to the spectral and temporal differences inherent to the stimuli. Similar results were obtained with both melodies and single tones. A second experiment replicated the findings despite the introduction of random loudness variation, indicating that timbre judgements can be made independently of loudness. We conclude that even musically unselected subjects are sensitive to spectral and temporal information in musical tones, and are able to use them independently in making perceptual judgements of musical timbre.
Identifying the Perceptual Dimensions of Musical Instrument Timbre
2018
Different musical instruments do not simply exhibit different musical timbres; they also evoke different phenomenological experiences, or "musical instrument qualia." Informal descriptions of instrument sounds seem to employ stereotypical characterizations, such as "airy" for a flute or "heavy" for a tuba. Previous research has sought to identify dimensions of timbre through listener judgments of paired comparisons (Grey, 1977, Kendall et al., 1999). Investigations into the semantic dimensions of timbre demonstrate that a number of descriptive terms map consistently onto particular acoustic correlates of timbre (e.g. Zacharkakis, Pastiadis, & Reiss, 2014). This three-part project aims to develop a model of the dimensions of musical instrument qualia. Results of the first two studies are reported here. In the first study, interviews were conducted with professional and semi-professional musicians in which they were asked to open-endedly describe the sounds of different musical instruments. Responses were subjected to content analysis using a pile-sort method, yielding an initial list of categories of musical instrument qualia. To test the reliability and usefulness of the dimensions yielded from the first study, the second study asked participants to rate musical instrument sounds according to the pile-sorted categories. Principal components analysis suggests ways in which categories with significant overlapping variance can be collapsed; preliminary results of this analysis are presented here. In the last stage of the study (not reported here), participants will rate an expanded number of instruments according to each of the dimensions in the final PCA model; these results will then be used to generate perceptual profiles for the most common Western musical instruments.