Some Factors in the Recognition of Timbre

Abstract

Listeners' recognition of wind-instrument tones was investigated for the tone concert F on the treble staff (frequency approximately 349 cps). Tones of a flute, oboe, B-flat clarinet, tenor saxophone, alto saxophone, cornet, trumpet, French horn, trombone, and baritone were recorded, equated for duration and sound level as well as frequency. Thirty university band members listened to these tones played back: unaltered, backward, with the rise and decay removed, and through a 480-cps low-pass filter. Recognition of wind-instrument tone quality was best for the unaltered playback, next best under the backward condition, next in the absence of rise and decay, and poorest under the filtered condition.

Laterality in the perception of temporal cues of musical timbre

“…However, a de®nition of timbre solely in terms of spectral composition is strictly appropriate only with reference to steady state sounds since it leaves out those aspects of timbre perception that depend on temporal parameters such as the characteristics of the attack and the rapid¯uctuations of the amplitude or even of the spectral composition of the sound [2,3,8,24,31,38]. Reference to these parameters, for instance, explains why it is generally easy to recognise a certain musical timbre even through the distorted spectral output of a transistor radio or why it is di cult to recognise the timbre of a piano if it is reproduced backwards even though the original and the reverse sound have the same harmonic composition [3].…”

Laterality effects in the processing of melody and timbre

“…One aspect of music that may be processed by the left hemisphere is timbre, which can be defined as "that attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar" ( [1], p. 45). Timbre may be processed in the left hemisphere because temporal information, especially the attack or initial part of a tone, appears to be important for the identification of musical instruments [4,33]. However, some studies of timbre recognition have failed to show any ear advantage [14,30,32,35], while others have suggested right-hemisphere dominance [2,13,23,24,31,34].…”

Separate Neural Processing of Timbre Dimensions in Auditory Sensory Memory

“…Early studies on timbre (Berger, 1964;Saldanha & Corso, 1964) assessed instrument identification by using recorded sounds and transformed versions of these sounds, which consisted in removing parts of the sounds or playing the sounds backward. Instrument recognition was altered under those conditions, suggesting that both spectral and temporal characteristics of the sounds were relevant for the task (see also Hajda, 1999).…”