MULTIDIMENSIONAL-SCALING OF SYNTHETIC MUSICAL TIMBRE - PERCEPTION OF SPECTRAL AND TEMPORAL CHARACTERISTICS

The perceptual correlates of acoustic parameters involved in musical t imbre were investigated by examining judgements of timbre dissimilarit y. Nine synthetic sounds were created, derived from crossing three lev els of spectral and temporal parameters (number of harmonics and rise time, respectively). Two separate conditions were tested, one using si ngle tones, the other using short melodies. Fifteen musically untraine d subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli and asked to judge dis similarity on an 8-point scale. The spatial configuration resulting fr om multidimensional analysis of the data was best fit by a three-dimen sional model, with the first two dimensions accounting for most of the variance. The perceptual space derived from the analysis indicates th at these two orthogonal dimensions corresponded closely to the spectra l and temporal differences inherent to the stimuli. Similar results we re obtained with both melodies and single tones. A second experiment r eplicated the findings despite the introduction of random loudness var iation, indicating that timbre judgements can be made independently of loudness. We conclude that even musically unselected subjects are sen sitive to spectral and temporal information in musical tones, and are able to use them independently in making perceptual judgements of musi cal timbre.