Separate Neural Processing of Timbre Dimensions in Auditory Sensory Memory

Caclin, Anne; Brattico, Elvira; Tervaniemi, Mari; Näätänen, Risto; Morlet, Dominique; Giard, Marie‐Hélène; McAdams, Stephen

doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.12.1959

Cited by 103 publications

(72 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…These dimensions timbre and affect dimensions: evidence from affect and similarity ratings and acoustic correlates of isolated instrument sounds have been commonly found in behavioral studies employing similarity ratings (Grey, 1977;Lakatos, 2000;McAdams, Winsberg, Donnadieu, De Soete, & Krimphoff, 1995), and have been further explored and (for the most part) corroborated in a series of meta-analytic overviews (Burgoyne & McAdams, 2008;Caclin, McAdams, Smith, & Winsberg, 2005). Several studies have also recently traced the neural underpinnings of these timbre dimensions (Caclin et al, 2008(Caclin et al, , 2006Menon et al, 2002). Much research on music and emotions investigates the links between perceived emotions and music (e.g., Juslin & Sloboda, 2010), but the precise definition of those emotions has been notoriously difficult to pin down, even if there is agreement over their general characteristics and subcomponents (Sloboda & Juslin, 2010;Zentner & Eerola, 2010).…”

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confidence: 86%

Timbre and Affect Dimensions: Evidence from Affect and Similarity Ratings and Acoustic Correlates of Isolated Instrument Sounds

2012

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considerable effort has been made towards understanding how acoustic and structural features contribute to emotional expression in music, but relatively little attention has been paid to the role of timbre in this process. Our aim was to investigate the role of timbre in the perception of affect dimensions in isolated musical sounds, by way of three behavioral experiments. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated perceived affects of 110 instrument sounds that were equal in duration, pitch, and dynamics using a three-dimensional affect model (valence, energy arousal, and tension arousal) and preference and emotional intensity. In Experiment 2, an emotional dissimilarity task was applied to a subset of the instrument sounds used in Experiment 1 to better reveal the underlying affect structure. In Experiment 3, the perceived affect dimensions as well as preference and intensity of a new set of 105 instrument sounds were rated by participants. These sounds were also uniform in pitch, duration, and playback dynamics but contained systematic manipulations in the dynamics of sound production, articulation, and ratio of high-frequency to low-frequency energy. The affect dimensions for all the experiments were then explained in terms of the three kinds of acoustic features extracted: spectral (e.g., ratio of high-frequency to low-frequency energy), temporal (e.g., attack slope), and spectro-temporal (e.g., spectral flux). High agreement among the participants' ratings across the experiments suggested that even isolated instrument sounds contain cues that indicate affective expression, and these are recognized as such by the listeners. A dominant portion (50-57%) of the two dimensions of affect (valence and energy arousal) could be predicted by linear combinations of few acoustic features such as ratio of high-frequency to low-frequency energy, attack slope, and spectral regularity. Links between these features and those observed in the vocal expression of affects and other sound phenomena are discussed.

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confidence: 86%

Timbre and Affect Dimensions: Evidence from Affect and Similarity Ratings and Acoustic Correlates of Isolated Instrument Sounds

2012

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“…Briefly, three pitch pulses from samples of a French horn and a tenor saxophone playing the same note (Opolko and Wapnick, 1989) were iterated to 500-ms duration and RMSmatched in amplitude. Samples were then edited to vary along one of two complex acoustic dimensions: attack/decay (AD) or spectral shape (SS), dimensions that are in principle relatively independent both perceptually and in early neural encoding (Caclin et al, 2006). AD was defined as the amplitude envelope of the stimulus which was set to zero at stimulus onset and offset, with linear ramps from onset to peak and back to offset without any steady state.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

Non-isomorphism in efficient coding of complex sound properties

Stilp

Kluender

2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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To the extent that sensorineural systems are efficient, stimulus redundancy should be captured in ways that optimize information transmission. Consistent with this principle, neural representations of sounds have been proposed to become “non-isomorphic,” increasingly abstract and decreasingly resembling the original (redundant) input. Here, non-isomorphism is tested in perceptual learning using AXB discrimination of novel sounds with two highly correlated complex acoustic properties and a randomly varying third dimension. Discrimination of sounds obeying the correlation became superior to that of sounds violating it despite widely varying physical acoustic properties, suggesting non-isomorphic representation of stimulus redundancy.

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“…Human speech and musical instruments naturally vary in AD and SS. In principle, these attributes are relatively independent, both perceptually and in early neural encoding (15). In detail, each complex dimension is a correlation in as much as attack duration is negatively correlated with decay, and amplitudes of individual harmonics increase or decrease in concert across changes in SS.…”

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confidence: 99%

Rapid efficient coding of correlated complex acoustic properties

Stilp

Rogers

Kluender

2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Natural sounds are complex, typically changing along multiple acoustic dimensions that covary in accord with physical laws governing sound-producing sources. We report that, after passive exposure to novel complex sounds, highly correlated features initially collapse onto a single perceptual dimension, capturing covariance at the expense of unitary stimulus dimensions. Discriminability of sounds respecting the correlation is maintained, but is temporarily lost for sounds orthogonal or oblique to experienced covariation. Following extended experience, perception of variance not captured by the correlation is restored, but weighted only in proportion to total experienced covariance. A Hebbian neural network model captures some aspects of listener performance; an anti-Hebbian model captures none; but, a principal components analysis model captures the full pattern of results. Predictions from the principal components analysis model also match evolving listener performance in two discrimination tasks absent passive listening. These demonstrations of adaptation to correlated attributes provide direct behavioral evidence for efficient coding.auditory perception | cortical models | perceptual organization

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Separate Neural Processing of Timbre Dimensions in Auditory Sensory Memory

Cited by 103 publications

References 68 publications

Timbre and Affect Dimensions: Evidence from Affect and Similarity Ratings and Acoustic Correlates of Isolated Instrument Sounds

Timbre and Affect Dimensions: Evidence from Affect and Similarity Ratings and Acoustic Correlates of Isolated Instrument Sounds

Non-isomorphism in efficient coding of complex sound properties

Rapid efficient coding of correlated complex acoustic properties

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