The Timbre Perception Test (TPT): A new interactive musical assessment tool to measure timbre perception ability
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The Timbre Perception Test (TPT): A new interactive musical assessment tool to measure timbre perception ability Harin Lee 1 & Daniel Müllensiefen 1 Published online: 11 June 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature. The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals. The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in which participants use a slider to reproduce heard auditory stimuli that vary along three important dimensions of timbre: envelope, spectral flux, and spectral centroid. With a sample of 95 participants, the TPT was calibrated and validated against measures of related abilities and examined for its reliability. The results indicate that a short-version (8 minutes) of the TPT has good explanatory support from a factor analysis model, acceptable internal reliability (α = .69, ωt = .70), good test–retest reliability (r = .79) and substantial correlations with selfreported general musical sophistication (ρ = .63) and pitch discrimination (ρ = .56), as well as somewhat lower correlations with duration discrimination (ρ = .27), and musical instrument discrimination abilities (ρ = .33). Overall, the TPT represents a robust tool to measure an individual’s timbre perception ability. Furthermore, the use of sliders to perform a reproductive task has shown to be an effective approach in threshold testing. The current version of the TPT is openly available for research purposes. Keywords Timbre perception . Musical abilities . Musical assessment . Psychoacoustics . Gold-MSI
Background Timbre is a primary perceptual attribute of complex sound, alongside pitch and loudness. Though, unlike pitch and loudness that are mainly related to a single physical parameter (i.e., frequency and sound intensity), timbre is a multidimensional attribute that arises from complex acoustic properties. It is broadly defined as colour or texture of an instrument (Helmholtz, 1954). Our ability to perceive such qualities from sounds enable us to discriminate a musical piece played by a buzzy trumpet from the same piece played by a mellow flute, even when both instruments are equal in loudness, tempo, and pitch (American National Standards Institute, 1994). Accordingly, timbre plays a key role in the recognition of sound sources because it is indicative of the event and action that triggered a sound (McAdams, 2013). Notwithstanding its importance, timbre remains a relatively poorly understood auditory attribute, presumably due to its multidimensional and * Harin Lee [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK
complicated nature being a challenge in psychological timbre research. Commencing with early works by Plomp (1970), Wessel (1973), and Grey (1977), who applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) of timbre (dis)similarity ratings, a lot of effort has been de
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