Multidimensional scaling of synthetic musical timbre: Perception of spectral and temporal characteristics.
- 1 December 1997
- journal article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie expérimentale
- Vol. 51 (4) , 307-315
- https://doi.org/10.1037/1196-1961.51.4.307
Abstract
The perceptual correlates of acoustic parameters involved in musical timbre were investigated by examining judgements of timbre dissimilarity. Nine synthetic sounds were created, derived from crossing three levels of spectral and temporal parameters (number of harmonics and rise time, respectively). Two separate conditions were tested, one using single tones, the other using short melodies. Fifteen musically untrained subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli and asked to judge dissimilarity on an 8-point scale. The spatial configuration resulting from multidimensional analysis of the data was best fit by a three-dimensional model, with the first two dimensions accounting for most of the variance. The perceptual space derived from the analysis indicates that these two orthogonal dimensions corresponded closely to the spectral and temporal differences inherent to the stimuli. Similar results were obtained with both melodies and single tones. A second experiment replicated the findings despite the introduction of random loudness variation, indicating that timbre judgements can be made independently of loudness. We conclude that even musically unselected subjects are sensitive to spectral and temporal information in musical tones, and are able to use them independently in making perceptual judgements of musical timbre.Keywords
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