Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Feb;145(2):1078. doi: 10.1121/1.5091778.
Sound onsets are commonly considered to play a privileged role in the identification of musical instruments, but the underlying acoustic features remain unclear. By using sounds resynthesized with and without rapidly varying transients (not to be confused with the onset as a whole), this study set out to specify precisely the role of transients and quasi-stationary components in the perception of musical instrument sounds. In experiment 1, listeners were trained to identify ten instruments from 250 ms sounds. In a subsequent test phase, listeners identified instruments from 64 ms segments of sounds presented with or without transient components, either taken from the onset, or from the middle portion of the sounds. The omission of transient components at the onset impaired overall identification accuracy only by 6%, even though experiment 2 suggested that their omission was discriminable. Shifting the position of the gate from the onset to the middle portion of the tone impaired overall identification accuracy by 25%. Taken together, these findings confirm the prominent status of onsets in musical instrument identification, but suggest that rapidly varying transients are less indicative of instrument identity compared to the relatively slow buildup of sinusoidal components during onsets.
音起始通常被认为在乐器识别中起着特殊的作用，但潜在的声学特征仍不清楚。本研究通过使用带有和不带有快速时变瞬变（不要与整个起始相混淆）的声音重新合成，旨在准确指定瞬变和准稳态成分在乐器声音感知中的作用。在实验 1 中，听众接受了从 250ms 声音中识别十种乐器的训练。在随后的测试阶段，听众从带有或不带有瞬态成分的声音的 64ms 片段中识别乐器，这些瞬态成分要么取自起始，要么取自声音的中间部分。即使实验 2 表明瞬态成分的缺失是可辨别的，但瞬态成分在起始处的缺失仅使整体识别准确率降低了 6%。将门的位置从起始处移到音调的中间部分，会使整体识别准确率降低 25%。总的来说，这些发现证实了音起始在乐器识别中的突出地位，但表明与起始时正弦成分的相对缓慢建立相比，快速变化的瞬变对乐器身份的指示性较小。
