Towards the Comparability and Generality of Timbre Space Studies

Beschreibung

Background: The perceptual relations of musical timbres are difficult to assess. The so called timbre spaces (TS) are a concept to depict timbre dissimilarities as spatial distances in a euclidean space. Since the 1970s, the TS concept, as intuitively accessible as it is, gained popularity within the scientific community and has been generally accepted. A recent comparison of several TS revealed a lack of consistency among TS studies (Siddiq et al. 2014). It's most likely caused by the from study to study vastly different stimuli-sets. Thus far, instruments were reduced to a single tone, compared at the same pitch, and only (re-)synthesized sounds were used.

Research question: These findings raise the question whether an empirical meta TS would rather comply with the results of the original TS or confirm the inconsistency.

Methods: Based on the original stimuli used by Grey (1975), Krumhansl (1989), McAdams et al. (1995), and additional natural instrument sounds out of the Vienna Symphonic Library (VSL), a hearing experiment was performed. The obtained dissimilarity matrix was, by means of a multidimensional scaling (MDS), graphed into a 3D scatter plot and eventually structured through a hierarchical clustering.

Results: The inconsistency is pretty much confirmed. Instead of an anticipated instrument clustering (e.g. all trumpets roughly located in the same region), the meta TS yields a clear clustering of stimuli-sets. Apparently, there is a greater timbral resemblance among the different instrument sounds from the same stimuli-set than among the sounds of the same instrument across the different stimuli-sets. Hence, these timbral differences between the stimuli-sets seem to prevail as primary features of timbre discrimination which in turn significantly impairs the comparability and thus the generality of TS studies.

Zeitraum	19 Sept. 2015
Ereignistitel	"Bridging the Gaps" - 3. Vienna Talk 2015 on Acoustics, Institut für Wiener Klangstil, MDW Wien
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	Wien, ÖsterreichAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	International