Timbre discrimination of musical instruments in a concert hall
Pamela J. Goad, Douglas H. Keefe · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1986
Isolated tones and melodies of six tones were recorded in different locations of a concert hall using five musical instruments played in their upper and lower registers. Each trial consisted of either a pair of tones or a pair of melodies recorded simultaneously at different locations on one instrument. The room transmission path to each location varied. Using a monaural headphone presentation, the task was to determine whether the pair was the “same” or “different” with respect to timbre. To prevent subjects from discriminating based upon room variation in background noise, it was necessary to add pink noise below 2700 Hz; however, the signal-to-noise ratio remained above 30 dB at all frequencies. Our results showed that subjects could discriminate timbre in this context. No significant differences were found between isolated tones and melodies, or between registers. Significant differences appeared between instruments with subjects best able to discriminate flute timbre followed in rank order by clarinet, trumpet, viola, and marimba. Work is in progress to compare results with theories of timbre perception.