Abstract
Timbre, the unique quality of a sound that points to its source, allows us to quickly identify a loved one’s voice in a crowd and distinguish a buzzy, bright trumpet from a warm cello. Despite its importance for perceiving the richness of auditory objects, timbre is a relatively poorly understood feature of sounds. Here we demonstrate for the first time that listeners adapt to the timbre of a wide variety of natural sounds. For each of several sound classes, participants were repeatedly exposed to two sounds (e.g., clarinet and oboe, male and female voice) that formed the endpoints of a morphed continuum. Adaptation to timbre resulted in consistent perceptual aftereffects, such that hearing sound A significantly altered perception of a neutral morph between A and B, making it sound more like B. Furthermore, these aftereffects were robust to moderate pitch changes, suggesting that adaptation to timbral features used for object identification drives these effects, analogous to face adaptation in vision.
Highlights
Timbre, the unique quality of a sound that points to its source, allows us to quickly identify a loved one’s voice in a crowd and distinguish a buzzy, bright trumpet from a warm cello
A few studies have separately investigated adaptation to individual dimensions of voice perception[6,7] or to a single pair of musical instruments[8]. It is unknown whether timbre adaptation generalizes to a broader range of natural sounds, musical instruments, and human voices, whether it is at all robust to changes in pitch, or whether it is driven by a single timbre feature, such as spectral centroid
If perceiving the identity of an object through timbre information requires integrating features into a holistic percept, adapting to one single dimension of timbre should not result in perceptual aftereffects on natural sound perception like the effects we report in Experiments 1 and 2
Summary
The unique quality of a sound that points to its source, allows us to quickly identify a loved one’s voice in a crowd and distinguish a buzzy, bright trumpet from a warm cello. Adaptation to timbre resulted in consistent perceptual aftereffects, such that hearing sound A significantly altered perception of a neutral morph between A and B, making it sound more like B These aftereffects were robust to moderate pitch changes, suggesting that adaptation to timbral features used for object identification drives these effects, analogous to face adaptation in vision. A few studies have separately investigated adaptation to individual dimensions of voice perception[6,7] or to a single pair of musical instruments[8] It is unknown whether timbre adaptation generalizes to a broader range of natural sounds, musical instruments, and human voices, whether it is at all robust to changes in pitch, or whether it is driven by a single timbre feature, such as spectral centroid. We found robust perceptual aftereffects, measured as shifts in the perceptual interpretation of morphs, resulting from adaptation to a variety of complex instrument and natural sounds
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