Investigation of timbre saliency, the attention-capturing quality of timbre

Chon, Song Hui; McAdams, Stephen

doi:10.1121/1.4708879

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…Our findings add to the body of work on the neural correlates of timbre change by indicating that changes in timbre also affect autonomic responding. Future work could lend insight into the influence of timbre change on autonomic responding by exploring a wider variety of timbres, as well as by considering the role of timbre saliency, a quality referring to how well a timbre captures one's attention (Chon & McAdams, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychophysiological responses to auditory change

2016

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A comprehensive characterization of autonomic and somatic responding within the auditory domain is currently lacking. We studied whether simple types of auditory change that occur frequently during music listening could elicit measurable changes in heart rate, skin conductance, respiration rate, and facial motor activity. Participants heard a rhythmically isochronous sequence consisting of a repeated standard tone, followed by a repeated target tone that changed in pitch, timbre, duration, intensity, or tempo, or that deviated momentarily from rhythmic isochrony. Changes in all parameters produced increases in heart rate. Skin conductance response magnitude was affected by changes in timbre, intensity, and tempo. Respiratory rate was sensitive to deviations from isochrony. Our findings suggest that music researchers interpreting physiological responses as emotional indices should consider acoustic factors that may influence physiology in the absence of induced emotions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychophysiological responses to auditory change

2016

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“…Two forms of saliency, intrinsic and extrinsic, exist. The former pertains to inherent properties of a given stimulus, and the latter refers to the stimulus's relation to other stimuli in a scene (Chon, 2013;Kayser et al, 2005). These two mechanisms interact to guide attention.…”

Section: Attention and Auditory Saliencymentioning

confidence: 99%

Instrument Timbre Combinations Influence The Relative Prominence of Perceptual Layers in Orchestral Music

Fischer,

McAdams

2023

Preprint

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The stratification of layers of differing prominence (foreground/background) is a common technique in orchestration. Musicians heard 23 excerpts containing foreground and background layers as previously determined by music analysts. A given layer comprised either a single auditory stream of one or more blended instruments or a harmonic or rhythmic background. Two-layer excerpts had either the same, overlapping, or different instrument families (timbre class). First, musicians rated the perceived degree of segregation of musical materials in two-layer and single-stream excerpts. Second, they heard each of the two layers in isolation and then together and rated the relative prominence of the layers. Heterogeneous instrument combinations yielded the greatest difference in relative prominence, followed by overlapping and then homogeneous combinations. Acoustic and score-based descriptors were extracted to quantify their relative contribution to perceptual stratification. Timbre class and between-layer differences in timbre and dynamics played a role, providing evidence of how timbral differences enhance relative prominence in orchestral music. Perceptual segregation was positively but very weakly related to relative prominence, supporting findings that although segregation is necessary to form layers, this mechanism is separable from that which places the streams into the same representational space to allow for the assessment of their relative prominence.

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“…In this paper, they examined the identification of an instrument sound in concurrent unison dyads. As a salient timbre is defined as one that captures listeners' attention easily and tends not to blend well with concurrent sounds (Chon and McAdams, 2012 ), we can logically expect that a salient timbre will be easily identified.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison and Analysis of Timbre Fusion for Chinese and Western Musical Instruments

et al. 2022

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Timbre fusion is the theoretical basis of instrument acoustics and Chinese and Western orchestral acoustics. Currently, studies on timbre fusion are mainly focused on Western instruments, but there are some studies on the timbre fusion of Chinese instruments. In this paper, the characteristics of timbre fusion for Chinese and Western instruments are explored, focusing on the subjective attributes and objective acoustic parameters, and a series of experiments is carried out. First, a database containing 518 mixed timbre stimuli of Chinese and Western instruments was constructed to provide basic data that are necessary for the subjective and objective analyses of timbre fusion. We designed and conducted a subjective evaluation experiment of timbre perception attributes based on the method of successive categories. The experimental data were processed using statistical approaches, such as variance analysis, multidimensional preference analysis, and correlation analysis, and we studied the influence of the temporal envelopes and instrument types on fusion, segregation, roughness, and pleasantness. In addition, the differences between Chinese and Western instruments were compared based on these four perception attributes. The results show that fusion and segregation are the most important attributes for Chinese instrument timbre, while roughness is the most important attribute for Western instrument timbre. In addition, multiple linear regression, random forest, and multilayer perceptron were used to construct a set of timbre fusion models for Chinese and Western instruments. The results show that these models can better predict the timbre fusion attributes. It was also found that there are some differences between the timbre fusion models for Chinese and Western instruments, which is consistent with the analysis results of subjective experimental data. The contribution of acoustic objective parameters to the fusion model is also discussed.

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Investigation of timbre saliency, the attention-capturing quality of timbre

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Psychophysiological responses to auditory change

Psychophysiological responses to auditory change

Instrument Timbre Combinations Influence The Relative Prominence of Perceptual Layers in Orchestral Music

Comparison and Analysis of Timbre Fusion for Chinese and Western Musical Instruments

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