Acoustics, perception and modelling of musical timbre

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Timbre refers to many dimensions of sound other than pitch, duration, loudness, and spatial position. My long-term research program studies the perception and cognition of musical timbre, with the aim of providing perceptual models for phenomena that play a significant role in musical practice and in the reception of music by listeners, as well as in everyday auditory experience. Acoustic descriptors related to timbre have been developed, but we need to test whether the way such descriptors vary over time is crucial to perception. We will also study timbre's covariation with pitch and playing effort in musical instrument sounds and will study the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the failure to identify instruments when played in extreme registers. We will also study how long-term representations of the timbral variations across pitch and playing effort are embodied in mental models of the behaviour of musical sound sources. Applying the psychomechanical approach and using digital models that can simulate processes representing sounding objects and the actions that make them vibrate, we will explore mental models of sound source behaviour by combining unlikely actions and objects (such as a blown plate and a struck air column). Timbre plays several roles in musical organization. It arises as an emergent property from the perceptual fusion of acoustic components into auditory events, including the blending of several events produced by separate instruments to create new timbres. We will test the hypothesis that emergent timbral properties of combinations depend on their blending. Other work will explore the effect of room reverberation, spatial position of instruments, and microphone placement on performance and perception of timbral blend in music recordings. We will study the timbral properties that play a crucial role in the segmentation of sound sequences into patterns that can be processed in working memory. In much orchestral music, timbral similarity plays a role, in concert with other musical parameters such as pitch and musical texture, in the looser grouping of instruments into foreground and background orchestral layers. We will study the contribution of timbre to auditory salience that brings some musical materials to the foreground, capturing a listener's attention. Memory for timbre is also of paramount importance in music. We will study short-term memory processes for the timbre of single events and timbral sequences. Timbral properties also strongly affect the emotional tone of music. We will explore the role of timbre in communicating emotion and inducing emotional response in music and will characterize the role of individual differences, acculturation, and familiarity with the instruments in felt emotion. This research has important implications for auditory psychology, hearing prostheses, auditory alarms, music recommendation engines, orchestral simulation, music performance, and sound engineering.