1. Current Developments in Timbre Research Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, Stephen McAdams
The goal of this chapter is to provide a roadmap and context for the whole volume. Hence, the chapter will provide a conceptual introduction to the notion of timbre and a brief survey of important steps in the history of timbre research. The content of the subsequent chapters will be briefly outlined and situated in an interdisciplinary framework, followed by a discussion of important research questions on timbre.
PART I: PRINCIPAL PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
2. The Perceptual Representation of Timbre
Stephen McAdams
This chapter covers the current state of knowledge about the structure of timbre's perceptual representation. It discusses dimensional models of timbre based on multidimensional scaling (MDS) of timbre dissimilarity ratings and addresses various extensions of MDS models as well as psychophysical explanations in terms of acoustical correlates of perceptual dimensions. It further covers research on the covariance of timbre, pitch, and loudness and discusses the ways in which this covariance affects the recognition and identification of sound sources. It further outlines the utility of considering high-dimensional acoustic representations such as modulation spectra as an acoustic basis for timbre modeling.
3. Timbre Categorization and Recognition
Trevor Agus, Clara Suied, Daniel Pressnitzer
There have been many important and intriguing empirical findings on the categorization and recognition of sounds in the last seven years. This chapter reviews these studies and specifically examines the minimal amount of acoustic and temporal information required to recognize sounds such as repeated noise bursts, isolated instrument sounds, or polyphonic musical textures. The chapter thus addresses the core question regarding the timbre cues utilized by humans for the recognition of various classes of sounds.
4. Memory for Timbre
Kai Siedenburg, Daniel Müllensiefen
This chapter discusses research on long- and short-term memory for timbre. A guiding question is whether timbre is stored independently from other mental tokens (e.g., pitch as in musical melodies, or words as in verbal utterances), and whether it is governed by the same principles as those observed in these neighboring domains. Finding answers to these question will involve decomposing memory for timbre into cognitive processes such as perceptual similarity, chunking, semantic encoding, as well as accounting for the factor of auditory expertise.
5. Concepts and Semantics in Timbre Perception
Charalampos Saitis, Stefan Weinzierl
In this chapter, verbal descriptions of timbre and the rich semantic associations found in them are considered. Metaphorical linguistic structures are central to the process of conceptualizing timbre by allowing the communication of subtle acoustic variations in terms of other more commonly shared sensory experiences--for instance, a sound felt, seen, or tasted as "velvety." A critical question addressed is the relationship between the semantics underlying the linguistic description of timbre and its perceptual dimensions.
6. Neural Basis of Timbre Processing Bruno Giordano
This chapter reviews recent findings regarding the neural basis of timbre information processing from studies using both animal models as well as human brain imaging. This includes the specific neural correlates
About the Author: Dr. Kai Siedenburg is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Independent Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany.
Dr. Charalampos Saitis is Humboldt Research Fellow in the Audio Communication Group at the Technical University of Berlin. Drs. Saitis and Siedenburg have published papers on musical sound quality and timbre, respectively. They conceived and co-organized the 2017 Berlin Interdisciplinary Workshop on Timbre.
Dr. Stephen McAdams is Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition and professor in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Montreal. Dr. McAdams is an internationally recognized expert on the perception and cognition of timbre.
