Microrhythmic characteristics of musical instrument initial transients
Rolf Bader · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2005
A microrhythmic analysis of initial transients of the violin, the guitar, the saxophone, the clarinet, and percussion instruments has been performed. They show characteristic patterns between instrument families, concerning the derivation of microrhythmic intervals within the tonal frequency range compared to psychoacoustic discrimination tasks by listeners. Microrhythm here is defined as the temporal distance between two amplitude peaks. As initial transients are a crucial part of the sound in terms of identification of instruments and the initial is just in the range of the second integration time of the ear, where frequency components can just be identified, these microrhythmic patterns could be a possibility for listeners to identify the instrument families. This is because microrhythmic intervals are instantaneously present and do not need an integration time span.