Samson S, Zatorre R J, Ramsay J O
Montreal Neurological Institute, Québec, Canada.
Can J Exp Psychol. 1997 Dec;51(4):307-15. doi: 10.1037/1196-1961.51.4.307.
The perceptual correlates of acoustic parameters involved in musical timbre were investigated by examining judgements of timbre dissimilarity. Nine synthetic sounds were created, derived from crossing three levels of spectral and temporal parameters (number of harmonics and rise time, respectively). Two separate conditions were tested, one using single tones, the other using short melodies. Fifteen musically untrained subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli and asked to judge dissimilarity on an 8-point scale. The spatial configuration resulting from multidimensional analysis of the data was best fit by a three-dimensional model, with the first two dimensions accounting for most of the variance. The perceptual space derived from the analysis indicates that these two orthogonal dimensions corresponded closely to the spectral and temporal differences inherent to the stimuli. Similar results were obtained with both melodies and single tones. A second experiment replicated the findings despite the introduction of random loudness variation, indicating that timbre judgements can be made independently of loudness. We conclude that even musically unselected subjects are sensitive to spectral and temporal information in musical tones, and are able to use them independently in making perceptual judgements of musical timbre.
通过检查音色差异判断来研究音乐音色中涉及的声学参数的感知关联。创建了九个合成声音，它们源自三个频谱和时间参数水平（分别为谐波数量和上升时间）的交叉组合。测试了两种不同的条件，一种使用单音，另一种使用短旋律。向15名未受过音乐训练的受试者呈现成对的刺激，并要求他们在8分制上判断差异。对数据进行多维分析得到的空间配置最适合三维模型，前两个维度占大部分方差。分析得出的感知空间表明，这两个正交维度与刺激固有的频谱和时间差异密切对应。旋律和单音都得到了类似的结果。尽管引入了随机响度变化，第二个实验仍重复了这些发现，表明音色判断可以独立于响度进行。我们得出结论，即使是未经过音乐筛选的受试者也对音乐音调中的频谱和时间信息敏感，并且能够在对音乐音色进行感知判断时独立使用这些信息。
