CiNii Books - Timbre : acoustics, perception, and cognition

Roughly defined as any property other than pitch, duration, and loudness that allows two sounds to be distinguished, timbre is a foundational aspect of hearing. The remarkable ability of humans to recognize sound sources and events (e.g., glass breaking, a friend's voice, a tone from a piano) stems primarily from a capacity to perceive and process differences in the timbre of sounds. Timbre raises many important issues in psychology and the cognitive sciences, musical acoustics, speech processing, medical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Current research on timbre perception unfolds along three main fronts: On the one hand, researchers explore the principal perceptual processes that orchestrate timbre processing, such as the structure of its perceptual representation, sound categorization and recognition, memory for timbre, and its ability to elicit rich semantic associations, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, timbre is studied as part of specific scenarios, including the perception of the human voice, as a structuring force in music, as perceived with cochlear implants, and through its role in affecting sound quality and sound design. Finally, computational acoustic models are sought through prediction of psychophysical data, physiologically inspired representations, and audio analysis-synthesis techniques. Along these three scientific fronts, significant breakthroughs have been achieved during the last decade. This volume will be the first book dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of timbre perception and cognition research and the acoustic modeling of timbre. The volume will serve as a natural complement to the SHAR volumes on the basic auditory parameters of Pitch edited by Plack, Oxenham, Popper, and Fay, and Loudness by Florentine, Popper, and Fay. Moreover, through the integration of complementary scientific methods ranging from signal processing to brain imaging, the book has the potential to leverage new interdisciplinary synergies in hearing science. For these reasons, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to various subfields of hearing science, including cognitive auditory neuroscience, psychoacoustics, music perception and cognition, but may even exert significant influence on fields such as musical acoustics, music information retrieval, and acoustic signal processing. It is expected that the volume will have broad appeal to psychologists, neuroscientists, and acousticians involved in research on auditory perception and cognition. Specifically, this book will have a strong impact on hearing researchers with interest in timbre and will serve as the key publication and up-to-date reference on timbre for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, as well as established scholars.

Table of Contents

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 Mullensiefen 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 of spectral and temporal shape discrimination, findings regarding the cortical representation of spectrotemporal information, and more general models of sound source identity processing in cortex. PART II: SPECIFIC SCENARIOS 7. Voice Processing and Voice Identity Recognition Samuel Mathias, Katharina von Kriegstein Humans effortlessly extract a wealth of information from speech sounds, including semantic, emotional, and details related to speaker identity. The chapter reviews the basic principles of human vocal production, behavioral studies on the processing and recognition of familiar and unfamiliar voices, as well as neural mechanisms and models of speaker recognition. The chapter further introduces to phonagnosia, the deficit of not being able to recognize familiar people by their voices and discusses its relation to autism spectrum disorder. 8. Timbre as a Structuring Force in Music Stephen McAdams Timbre plays a substantial part in shaping the perceptual experience of music. This chapter reviews the processes that may serve as the basis of this phenomenon with a particular focus on auditory scene analysis principles. Specific perceptual processes to be addressed include timbre's dependence on concurrent grouping (including timbral blend), the processing of sequential timbral relations, its role in sequential and segmental grouping, and the contribution of these grouping processes to musical structuring. The discussion draws from psychophysical studies as well as a discussion of selected musical examples from the Western orchestral repertoire. 9. Timbre Perception with Cochlear Implants Jeremy Marozeau The chapter outlines timbre perception of patients with severe or profound hearing loss that have received a cochlear implant (CI). Whereas the perception of speech in quiet works relatively well for CI patients, music perception or voice identity perception still pose great problems. The chapter will discuss CI research on timbre dissimilarity perception, musical instrument identification, auditory stream segregation, issues in voice identity and gender recognition, as well as potential improvements for CI coding strategies. 10. Timbre, Sound Quality, and Sound Design Guillaume Lemaitre, Patrick Susini This chapter focusses on the role of timbre in the evaluation of product sounds, related to the question of how sounds contribute to the aesthetic, functional, and emotional aspect of a product. Research in this domain has utilized multidimensional scaling in conjunction with acoustic-descriptor-based approaches and regression modeling in order to develop models of sound quality that can be applicable in sound design. Example cases are diverse and include products such as car horns, wind turbines or consumer electronics devices such as printers. Implications for approaches to sonic interaction design are discussed. PART III: ACOUSTICAL MODELING <11. Timbre Descriptors Geoffroy Peeters A sophisticated machinery for the acoustic description of sounds is essential for progress in timbre perception and cognition. This chapter provides a survey of approaches and current trends to acoustic characterization of timbre. Many scalar or time-varying descriptors are based on the Short-Time Fourier Transform from which summary measures are computed (e.g., the spectral center of gravity). Others are inspired by signal transformations that more closely follow auditory physiology. An important aspect of audio representation is that descriptors are usually highly correlated, so appropriate statistical approaches must be followed to cope with collinearity to effectively use these descriptors in the service of psychophysical explanations. 12. Modulation Representations for Speech and Music Mounya Elhilali This chapter outlines recent advances in the application and study of spectrotemporal modulation representations in speech and music. This work develops a neuro-computational framework based on spectrotemporal receptive fields, recorded from neurons in the mammalian primary auditory cortex, as well as from simulated cortical neurons. The chapter discusses the utility of applying this framework to the automatic classification of musical instrument sounds and to robust detection of speech in noise. 13. Analysis-Synthesis Approaches: Impact Sounds, Textures, and Musical Instruments Solvi Ystad, Mitsuko Aramaki, Richard Kronland-Martinet This chapter introduces an analysis-synthesis framework that derives intuitive control parameters of electronic sound synthesis directly from the statistics of input sounds. The framework is based on the distinction of action and object properties that are related to the mode of sound source excitation and resonance properties, respectively. The chapter reviews recent applications of this framework to the synthesis of impact sounds, textures, and musical instrument sounds.

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Timbre : acoustics, perception, and cognition

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