Instruments unheard of: On the role of familiarity and sound source categories in timbre perception

Abstract

Musical timbre has traditionally been treated as a sensory phenomenon, that is, as a '‘surface feature’’ that resides in the musical moment. The role of familiarity with sound source categories and instrument families has remained unexplored. The current chapter takes a dedicatedly cognitive view on timbre and argues that long-term familiarity and knowledge about instrument categories affect even such supposedly low-level tasks as dissimilarity ratings. As a background, the chapter provides a conceptual framework for the notion of timbre, as well as an outline of basic results from timbre dissimilarity ratings and instrument identification. Results from a previous study on the role of sound source categories in timbre dissimilarity ratings are then discussed in depth (Siedenburg et al. in Frontiers in Psychology 6, 2016b). This study collected timbre dissimilarity ratings for tones from acoustic musical instruments as well as for novel, digitally transformed tones. The main pieces of evidence to be discussed come from rating asymmetries and a regression model. It is argued that timbre perception is characterized by an interplay of sensory and categorical representations, reflecting acoustic facets and learned sound source and instrument categories of musical instruments. Implications for the design of novel digital musical instrument design are being discussed.