Learning metrics on spectrotemporal modulations reveals the perception of musical instrument timbre

Thoret, Etienne; Caramiaux, Baptiste; Depalle, Philippe; McAdams, Stephen

doi:10.1038/s41562-020-00987-5

Cited by 34 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…One of the least studied aspects of traditional music is timbre, or the "character" of a sound. Timbre is notoriously di cult to quantify (Thoret et al, 2021) and has historically been overlooked by Western researchers (with the notable exception of Cantometrics), and yet is a fundamental component of music traditions (Nikolsky et al, 2020). Nikolsky et al (2020) argue that, since timbral details are lost in collective performances, solo music traditions like the Eurasian jaw harp may prioritize timbre as a form of self-expression.…”

Section: Traditional and Folk Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution and music

Youngblood¹,

Ozaki²,

Savage³

2021

Preprint

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The universality and diversity of music in human societies make it an important research model for understanding how cultural features change over time and space. In this chapter, we review research on the cultural evolution of music, broken down into three major approaches: 1) corpus-based approaches that use large datasets to infer evolutionary patterns, 2) experimental approaches that explore cultural transmission and transformation, and 3) research on “music-like” behaviors in non-human species, such as bird and whale song, that highlights shared mechanisms and future directions. Finally, we discuss applications of this research to issues like copyright enforcement and algorithmic inequality. Given the diversity of musical datasets that have yet to be fully leveraged, we think that music has the potential to become a powerful research model for cultural evolution.

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Section: Traditional and Folk Musicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural evolution and music

Youngblood¹,

Ozaki²,

Savage³

2021

Preprint

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“…Moreover, several studies in the field of crossmodal correspondences investigate widely shared perceived analogies between different sensory stimuli [27]. Timbre occupies a relevant position in recent studies [28,29].…”

Section: And Comparisonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Color and Timbre Gestures: An Approach with Bicategories and Bigroupoids

Mannone

Santini²,

Adedoyin

et al. 2022

Mathematics

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White light can be decomposed into different colors, and a complex sound wave can be decomposed into its partials. While the physics behind transverse and longitudinal waves is quite different and several theories have been developed to investigate the complexity of colors and timbres, we can try to model their structural similarities through the language of categories. Then, we consider color mixing and color transition in painting, comparing them with timbre superposition and timbre morphing in orchestration and computer music in light of bicategories and bigroupoids. Colors and timbres can be a probe to investigate some relevant aspects of visual and auditory perception jointly with their connections. Thus, the use of categories proposed here aims to investigate color/timbre perception, influencing the computer science developments in this area.

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“…Additional dimensions appear to depend on the specific stimulus set. More recently a study applied a biologically inspired model that involved learning kernel distance functions over data from 17 previous dissimilarity studies [19]. Results showed that as well as sharing general acoustic correlates, each study's dataset yielded a number of experiment-specific correlates, suggesting that care should be taken in generalizing the results of any particular timbre study.…”

Section: From Sounds To Adjectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disembodied Timbres: A Study on Semantically Prompted FM Synthesis

Hayes¹,

Saitis²,

Fazekas³

2022

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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Disembodied electronic sounds constitute a large part of the modern auditory lexicon, but research into timbre perception has focused mostly on the tones of conventional acoustic musical instruments. It is unclear whether insights from these studies generalize to electronic sounds, nor is it obvious how these relate to the creation of such sounds. This work presents an experiment on the semantic associations of sounds produced by FM synthesis with the aim of identifying whether existing models of timbre semantics are appropriate for such sounds. A novel experimental paradigm, in which experienced sound designers responded to semantic prompts by programming a synthesizer, was applied, and semantic ratings on the sounds they created were provided. Exploratory factor analysis revealed a five-dimensional semantic space. The first two factors mapped well to the concepts of luminance, texture, and mass. The remaining three factors did not have clear parallels, but correlation analysis with acoustic descriptors suggested an acoustical relationship to luminance and texture. The results suggest that further inquiry into the timbres of disembodied electronic sounds, their synthesis, and their semantic associations would be worthwhile and that this could benefit research into auditory perception and cognition and synthesis control and audio engineering.

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Learning metrics on spectrotemporal modulations reveals the perception of musical instrument timbre

Cited by 34 publications

References 45 publications

Cultural evolution and music

Cultural evolution and music

Color and Timbre Gestures: An Approach with Bicategories and Bigroupoids

Disembodied Timbres: A Study on Semantically Prompted FM Synthesis

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