Timbre Discrimination for Brief Instrument Sounds
Bigoni, Francesco, Sofia Dahl · VBN Forskningsportal (Aalborg Universitet) · 2018
Timbre discrimination, even for very brief sounds, allows identification and separation of different sound sources. The existing literature on the effect of duration on timbre recognition shows high performance for remarkably short time window lengths, but does not address the possible effect of musical training. In this study, we applied an adaptive procedure to investigate the effect of musical training on individual thresholds for instrument identification. A timbre discrimination task consisting of a 4-alternative forced choice (4AFC) of brief instrument sounds with varying duration was assigned to 16 test subjects using an adaptive staircase method. The effect of musical training has been investigated by dividing the participants into two groups: musicians and non-musicians. The experiment showed lowest thresholds for the guitar sound and highest for the violin sound, with a high overall performance level, but no significant difference between the two groups. It is suggested that the test subjects adjust the weightings of the perceptual dimensions of timbre according to different degrees of acoustic degradation of the stimuli, which are evaluated both by plotting extracted audio features in a feature space and by considering the timbral specificities of the four instruments.