Psychoacoustically informed spectrography and timbre

Abstract

Pitch and loudness are subjective aspects of sound which rating of timbre. Indeed, formal definitions of timbre can be described in terms of the observed abilities of reflect this: 'Timbre is that attribute of auditory subjects to rate them on a scale from 'low' to 'high'. Timbre sensation in terms of which a listener can judge two is a subjective aspect of sound for which there is no such sounds similarly presented and having the same loudscale and neither qualitative nor quantitative descriptions ness and pitch as being dissimilar' (ANSI 1960). In are generally found that are widely accepted. The purpose other words, two sounds which have the same perof this paper is to shed light on some frequency domain ceived loudness as well as pitch (and, to be complete, aspects of the nature of timbre by making use of the results duration), but are nevertheless perceived as being difobtained from an analysis system which is designed to take ferent, are said to differ by virtue of their timbre. advantage of contemporary psychoacoustical knowledge Timbre then, relates to those aspects of the note relating to human peripheral hearing. Results are presented which illustrate the relationship between contemporary which can be varied without affecting the perceived psychoacoustic ideas relating to timbre and ideas first pitch, duration or loudness of a note, such as the discussed by Helmholtz and later taken up by other frequencies and amplitudes of individual components researchers. Analyses by the system of a selection of sounds and how they vary during a sound. Of particular from acoustic musical instruments with clear timbral importance in relation to the perceived timbre is the differences are also presented in order to place these nature of these changes during the onset and offset discussions in a musical context. * The authors would like to thank Paul Murrin for help with the preparation of the figures. The development of the real-time For the purposes of this work, the human peripheral transputer system was supported by UK-EPSRC research grant No. GR͞J42267. hearing system is assumed to comprise the outer,

An Interlanguage Study of Musical Timbre Semantic Dimensions and Their Acoustic Correlates

“…The correlations for both linguistic groups indicate that sounds with stronger high partials are more likely to be characterized as rough or harsh and the opposite as round or soft. This appears to support Faure et al (1996), Howard and Tyrrell (1997), Barthet, Depalle, et al (2010) and Barthet, Depalle, Kronland-Martinet, and Ystad (2011), who have generally associated higher spectral centroid values with roughness and shrillness and lower spectral centroid values with softness.…”

Human Hearing Modelling Real-Time Spectrography for Visual Feedback in Singing Training

“…Flexispect can also produce traditional narrow-band (45 Hz) and wide-band (300 Hz) spectrograms to enable direct comparisons to be made, as well as long-term average spectra (LTAS) based on each of its spectrographic analyses. Its use has been demonstrated in the contexts of speech analysis [28] , forensic speech analysis [29] , and musical timbre analysis [30] .…”