Reviewing the Definition of Timbre as it Pertains to the Perception of Speech and Musical Sounds

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the definition of timbre as it pertains to the vowels of speech. There are two forms of size information in these source-filter sounds, information about the size of the excitation mechanism (the vocal folds), and information about the size of the resonators in the vocal tract that filter the excitation before it is projected into the air. The current definitions of pitch and timbre treat the two forms of size information differently. In this paper, we argue that the perception of speech sounds by humans suggests that the definition of timbre would be more useful if it grouped the size variables together and separated the pair of them from the remaining properties of these sounds.