Abstract
Pitch and timbre perception are both based on the frequency content of sound, but previous perceptual experiments have disagreed about whether these two dimensions are processed independently from each other. We tested the interaction of pitch and timbre variations using sequential comparisons of sound pairs. Listeners judged whether two sequential sounds were identical along the dimension of either pitch or timbre, while the perceptual distances along both dimensions were parametrically manipulated. Pitch and timbre variations perceptually interfered with each other and the degree of interference was modulated by the magnitude of changes along the un-attended dimension. These results show that pitch and timbre are not orthogonal to each other when both are assessed with parametrically controlled variations.
Highlights
In everyday life, people attend simultaneously to both the pitch and timbre of sounds
A sequential comparison task revealed a consistent interference between pitch and timbre variations for a set of novel sounds, where pitch and timbre were both appropriately quantified and parametrically varied
Note: The table shows uncorrected p-values for the slope of individual regression lines. p-values .0.05 mean that the hypothesis of equal slopes cannot be rejected
Summary
People attend simultaneously to both the pitch and timbre of sounds. The pitch contour of a sentence carries prosodic information, while timbre variations enable listeners to identify phonemes and vowels necessary for speech segmentation; both contribute to speaker gender and body size perception [1]. Both are central to music perception: pitch typically defines melodies and timbre distinguishes different instruments. Such sequential comparisons are ecologically relevant because meaningful pitch and timbre variations in music and speech streams typically involve serial comparisons over time
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