Methodological approaches to the investigation of musical timbre

Abstract

Most of the difficulties connected with verbal determination and quantification of the phenomenon called «timbre» or «sound color» are caused by the multidimensional nature of this perceptual attribute of sound. After giving a brief historical review of the methodological evolution of the research on the perception of musical timbre, this paper illustrates some of the appropriate psychoacoustical research methods and associated statistical techniques by use of examples from the investigations of trombone timbre and overall sound quality made in WZORT, Prague in the course of the last decade. The verbal timbre descriptions obtained in a postal survey and through interviews, as well as the non-verbal data (gained both in a series of listening tests and through the spectral analysis of trombone tones), were processed by various multivariate statistical methods such as hierarchical clustering, factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, multiple linear regression, etc. The resultant findings are compared and discussed