Rapid Adaptation to the Timbre of Natural Sounds

Abstract

Timbre, the unique quality of a sound that points to its source, allows us to quickly identify a loved one’s voice in a crowd and distinguish a buzzy, bright trumpet from a warm cello. Despite its importance for perceiving the richness of auditory objects, timbre is a relatively poorly understood feature of sounds. Here we demonstrate for the first time that listeners adapt to the timbre of a wide variety of natural sounds. For each of several sound classes, participants were repeatedly exposed to two sounds (e.g., clarinet and oboe, male and female voice) that formed the endpoints of a morphed continuum. Adaptation to timbre resulted in consistent perceptual aftereffects, such that hearing sound A significantly altered perception of a neutral morph between A and B, making it sound more like B. Furthermore, these aftereffects were robust to moderate pitch changes, suggesting that adaptation to timbral features used for object identification drives these effects, analogous to face adaptation in vision.

Serial Dependence of Emotion Within and Between Stimulus Sensory Modalities

“…What is interesting is that serial dependencies are not specific to the visual domain. Indeed, similar short-term dependencies have been reported within the auditory domain when participants were instructed to judge the direction of an auditory frequency sweep (Alais et al, 2015), the loudness (Holland & Lockhead, 1968;Jesteadt et al 1977), or the timbre (Piazza et al, 2018) of a sound. Serial dependencies have also been observed within the tactile domain when rats had to judge each vibrissae (or whiskers) vibration (Hachen et al, 2020).…”

Vocal emotion adaptation aftereffects within and across speaker genders: Roles of timbre and fundamental frequency

“…In Experiment 1, we found timbre to play a larger role than F0 in vocal emotion adaptation. These findings are in line with Skuk et al (2015), who found very similar results for adaptation to vocal gender and with Piazza et al (2018), who suggested timbre as the critical parameter for auditory adaptation by showing rapid and robust aftereffects for a variety of natural sounds. However, the present results conflict with Hubbard and Assmann (2013), who argued that F0 is crucial for vocal emotion adaptation, after they failed to observe aftereffects in a F0-removed condition.…”

“…Thus, vocal emotion adaptation may be affected by the auditory similarity between adaptors and targets, irrespective of speaker gender. For timbre-only adaptation, Piazza et al (2018) found aftereffects to be robust to moderate pitch changes, but to decrease with more substantial pitch differences, until they were only marginally measurable at 9 semitones difference. In our sample, F0 of male and female speakers differed by about 90 Hz, which corresponds to an average change of 5-6 semitones.…”

“…Recently, Piazza et al (2018) suggested that timbre plays a crucial role in adaptation to a variety of natural sounds, including human voices, environmental sounds, and musical instruments. By definition, timbre reflects a combination of several parameters (e.g.…”

“…formant frequencies or spectral energy distribution), as it is "the difference between two voices of identical F0, intensity and temporal structure" (ANSI, 1973). Based on an absence of aftereffects following adaptation to a single aspect of timbre, Piazza et al (2018) argued that timbre adaptation depends on integrating all timbral features into a holistic percept of an auditory object. Thus, while the role of acoustic cues for vocal emotion adaptation remains unclear, evidence from other acoustic domains suggest a predominant role of timbre.…”