Audio Communication Group, TU Berlin, Einsteinufer 17c, D-10587 Berlin, Germany.
Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics and Cluster of Excellence Hearing4all, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg 26129, Germany.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Oct;148(4):2256. doi: 10.1121/10.0002275.
Timbre dissimilarity of orchestral sounds is well-known to be multidimensional, with attack time and spectral centroid representing its two most robust acoustical correlates. The centroid dimension is traditionally considered as reflecting timbral brightness. However, the question of whether multiple continuous acoustical and/or categorical cues influence brightness perception has not been addressed comprehensively. A triangulation approach was used to examine the dimensionality of timbral brightness, its robustness across different psychoacoustical contexts, and relation to perception of the sounds' source-cause. Listeners compared 14 acoustic instrument sounds in three distinct tasks that collected general dissimilarity, brightness dissimilarity, and direct multi-stimulus brightness ratings. Results confirmed that brightness is a robust unitary auditory dimension, with direct ratings recovering the centroid dimension of general dissimilarity. When a two-dimensional space of brightness dissimilarity was considered, its second dimension correlated with the attack-time dimension of general dissimilarity, which was interpreted as reflecting a potential infiltration of the latter into brightness dissimilarity. Dissimilarity data were further modeled using partial least-squares regression with audio descriptors as predictors. Adding predictors derived from instrument family and the type of resonator and excitation did not improve the model fit, indicating that brightness perception is underpinned primarily by acoustical rather than source-cause cues.
管弦乐音色的音品差异众所周知是多维的，起音时间和频谱重心是其两个最可靠的声学关联维度。传统上认为，该音品维度反映了音色的明亮度。然而，多个连续的声学和/或范畴线索是否会影响明亮度感知，这个问题尚未得到全面解决。本研究采用三角剖分法来检验音色明亮度的维度、不同心理声学环境下的稳定性，以及与声源归因感知的关系。在三个不同的任务中，听众比较了 14 种声学乐器声音，这些任务收集了总体差异、明亮度差异和直接多刺激亮度评分。结果证实，明亮度是一个稳定的单一听觉维度，直接评分再现了总体差异的重心维度。当考虑亮度差异的二维空间时，其第二维度与总体差异的起音时间维度相关，这被解释为反映了后者对亮度差异的潜在渗透。进一步使用偏最小二乘回归模型对相似度数据进行建模，将音频描述符作为预测因子。添加源自乐器家族以及共鸣器和激励类型的预测因子并不能提高模型拟合度，表明明亮度感知主要由声学线索而非声源归因线索支撑。
