Abstract
A series of experiments examined the acoustic attributes of timbre that most contribute to auditory stream segregation. In the first experiment, listeners heard short sequences of repeated pairs of tones from orchestral instruments, and were asked to rate how strongly the tones formed different streams. These ratings were used as difference measures, and were fit to a two-dimensional space using multidimensional scaling. One dimension corresponded to average spectral frequency, and the other to multiple dynamic factors. These ratings were highly correlated with similarity judgments from a previous study. A second experiment assessed if the dynamic factors indirectly contributed to streaming by influencing perceptual attack time. The perceptual attack time of each tone was measured, and new sequences were recorded with the perceptual attacks isochronous. The results were highly correlated with the first experiment, and the effect of the dynamic factors was not diminished. These experiments indicate that streaming and similarity judgments are based on the same acoustic attributes. Implications for the segregation of melodic lines in music will be discussed.
Published Version
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