Timbre Cues and the Identification of Musical Instruments

Abstract

This study was designed to evaluate the relative importance of transients, harmonic structure, and vibrato as timbre cues in the absolute judgment of musical tones. Tape recordings were made of tones played on ten different instruments at C4, F4, and A4 of the equally tempered scale. Appropriate splicing and retaping procedures provided a test tape with 300 randomly ordered tonal stimuli (10 instruments × 3 frequencies × 2 playing styles × 5 types of tones). Twenty trained musicians were tested and retested on the final tape in two experimental sessions. S's were provided with a reminder list of 39 instruments (grouped into classes) and were required to identify the particular instrument for each tonal stimulus. The results of this study indicate that (1) some instruments (e.g., clarinet, oboe, and flute) are identified more easily than others (e.g., violin, cello, and bassoon); (2) more correct identifications are made at F4 than C4 or A4; (3) the best identification is made for stimuli consisting of initial transients and a short steady state; (4) a vibrato tone is better identified than a nonvibrato tone; and (5) identification is improved significantly with practice. Suggestions are offered for further research.

Perception of dynamic information for vowels in syllable onsets and offsets

“…Vowelonset intervals correlated -.91 with estimates of speaking rate, while vowel offset intervals correlated only +.30 with estimates of speaking rate. An analogy with the identification of musical instruments is also suggested; musical acousticians (e.g., Saldanha & Corso, 1964) reported that identification of musical instruments is difficult when the attack portion of a sustained note is deleted, but is unaffected by the presence or absence of the decay transients. The information for identifying the instrument is well represented in the onset but poorly represented in the offset.…”

Categorization by schema relations and perceptual similarity in 5-year-olds and adults: A study in vision and in audition

“…Vision and audition often work in concert for processing environmental cues (Saldana & Rosenblum, 1993). As a preliminary approach to answering the question of how these sensory modalities interact for processing such cues, we need to consider the way in which participants categorize auditory stimuli (compared with what has been observed for visual stimuli).…”

“…The well-known McGurk eVect illustrates how we combine auditory and visual information when perceiving speech units (MacDonald & McGurk, 1978). Multimodal perception involving vision and audition is not limited to the domain of language; this type of eVect has also been demonstrated with nonverbal stimuli (Saldana & Rosenblum, 1993). In many situations, auditory cues help us to perceive the visual and structural characteristics of objects.…”

Control parameters for musical instruments: a foundation for new mappings of gesture to sound

“…Thus, if we electronically edit out the attack of a piano tone and an oboe tone, the instruments are surprisingly difficult to tell apart (Saldanha and Corso 1964). These phenomena were known to Stumpf as early as 1910, and later elaborated by Pierre Schaeffer (1966) in the famous 'cut bell' experiments.…”