Discrimination of random spectral alterations in repeated notes of sustained musical instrument tones
Chung Lee, Andrew Horner · Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) · 2014
Eight sustained musical instrument sounds were randomly altered by a time-invariant process to determine how well spectral alteration could be detected on repeated notes. Sounds were resynthesized in a series of eight 0.25-second repeated notes and spectrally altered with average spectral alterations of 8, 16, 24, 32, and 48 percent. Listeners were asked to discriminate each randomly altered repeated note sequence from the original unaltered sequence. The results showed that spectrally altered repeated note sequences were significantly more discriminable than single tones of the same duration (two seconds). Non-uniform repeated note sequences were more discriminable than uniform sequences that simply repeated the same random instance. Spectral incoherence was significantly correlated with discrimination scores, which agrees with our previous study of random spectral alteration of single tones.