Short-term Recognition of Timbre Sequences

Abstract

The goal of the current study was to explore outstanding questions in the field of timbre perception and cognition—specifically, whether memory for timbre is better in trained musicians or in nonmusicians, whether short-term timbre recognition is invariant to pitch differences, and whether timbre dissimilarity influences timbre recognition performance. Four experiments examined short-term recognition of musical timbre using a serial recognition task in which listeners indicated whether the orders of the timbres of two subsequently presented sound sequences were identical or not. Experiment 1 revealed significant effects of sequence length on recognition accuracy and an interaction of music training and pitch variability: musicians performed better for variable-pitch sequences, but did not differ from nonmusicians with constant-pitch sequences. Experiment 2 yielded a significant effect of pitch variability for musicians when pitch patterns varied between standard and comparison sequences. Experiment 3 high-lighted the impact of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds and indicated a recency effect in timbre recognition. Experiment 4 confirmed the importance of the dissimilarity of the swap, but did not yield any pertinent role of timbral heterogeneity of the sequence. Further analyses confirmed the strong correlation of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds with response behavior, accounting for around 90% of the variance in response choices across all four experiments. These results extend findings regarding the impact of music training and pitch variability from the literature on timbre perception to the domain of short-term memory and demonstrate the mnemonic importance of timbre similarity relations among sounds in sequences. The role of the factors of music training, pitch variability, and timbral similarity in music listening is discussed.

Semantic Crosstalk in Timbre Perception

“…For example, semantic interference was found only for the natural instrument signals in Experiment 2a, and musicians outperformed nonmusicians on these stimuli. This may seem to confirm research supporting the positive effects of musical training on the encoding of timbral properties (Chartrand & Belin, 2006; Siedenburg & McAdams, 2018). Why did synthesizers in Experiment 2a fail to elicit the same magnitude of effect as natural instruments?…”

“…Does extensive exposure to certain instrumental timbres and timbre-descriptive lexicons strengthen automaticity of cross-modal associations? Musical training has been shown to play a role in some perceptual evaluations of timbre (Chartrand & Belin, 2006; McAdams, Douglas, & Vempala, 2017; Siedenburg & McAdams, 2018; but see Filipic, Tillmann, & Bigand, 2010): we may expect, then, that trained musicians will possess a more finely tuned timbre–semantic repertoire than nonmusicians. On the other hand, if cross-modal correspondence reflects some degree of synesthetic congruency, then musical background would plausibly play an indeterminate role.…”

Neurophysiological time course of timbre-induced music-like perception

“…As sequence length increased, discrimination accuracy decreased significantly for the loudness sequences while discrimination accuracy decreased only marginally for pitch and timbre. Furthermore, it has been found that musicians perform significantly better at short-term recognition of variable-pitch sequences than non-musicians, though there was no significant difference in performance between musicians and non-musicians in discriminating constant-pitch sequences (Siedenburg & McAdams, 2018). A recent study by Graves and colleagues (2019) on congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder in which individuals exhibit a deficit in musical perception, examined individuals with amusia performing a short-term memory task in which they had to extract pitch, brightness, and loudness contours using novel melodies.…”