Erickson Molly L
Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996, USA.
J Voice. 2003 Jun;17(2):195-206. doi: 10.1016/s0892-1997(03)00022-5.
Traditionally, timbre has been defined as that perceptual attribute that differentiates two sounds when pitch and loudness are equal and thus is a measure of dissimilarity. By such a definition, each voice possesses a set of timbres, and the identity of any voice or voice category across different pitch-loudness-vowel combinations must be due to an abstraction of the pattern of timbre transformation. Using stimuli produced across the singing range by singers from different voice categories, this study sought to examine how timbre and pitch interact in the perception of dissimilarity. This study also investigated whether listener experience affects the perception of timbre as a function of pitch. The resulting multidimensional scaling (MDS) representations showed that for all stimuli and listeners, dimension 1 correlated with pitch, whereas dimension 2 correlated with spectral centroid and separated vocal stimuli into the categories mezzo-soprano and soprano. Dimension 3 appeared highly idiosyncratic depending on the nature of the stimuli and on the experience of the listener. Inexperienced listeners appeared to rely more heavily on pitch in making dissimilarity judgments than did experienced listeners. The resulting MDS representations of dissimilarity across pitch provide a glimpse of the timbre transformation of voice categories across pitch.
传统上，音色被定义为当音高和响度相同时区分两种声音的感知属性，因此是一种差异度量。按照这样的定义，每个声音都具有一组音色，并且任何声音或声音类别在不同音高 - 响度 - 元音组合下的特征必定归因于音色转换模式的抽象。本研究使用来自不同声音类别的歌手在整个歌唱音域内产生的刺激，试图探究音色和音高在差异感知中是如何相互作用的。本研究还调查了听众经验是否会影响作为音高函数的音色感知。由此产生的多维标度（MDS）表示表明，对于所有刺激和听众，维度1与音高相关，而维度2与频谱中心相关，并将声乐刺激分为女中音和女高音类别。维度3似乎高度特异，这取决于刺激的性质和听众的经验。与经验丰富的听众相比，缺乏经验的听众在做出差异判断时似乎更依赖音高。由此产生的跨音高差异的MDS表示让我们得以一窥不同音高上声音类别的音色转换。
