Abstract
Sound onsets are commonly considered to play a privileged role in the identification of musical instruments, but the underlying acoustic features remain unclear. By using sounds resynthesized with and without rapidly varying transients (not to be confused with the onset as a whole), this study set out to specify precisely the role of transients and quasi-stationary components in the perception of musical instrument sounds. In experiment 1, listeners were trained to identify ten instruments from 250 ms sounds. In a subsequent test phase, listeners identified instruments from 64 ms segments of sounds presented with or without transient components, either taken from the onset, or from the middle portion of the sounds. The omission of transient components at the onset impaired overall identification accuracy only by 6%, even though experiment 2 suggested that their omission was discriminable. Shifting the position of the gate from the onset to the middle portion of the tone impaired overall identification accuracy by 25%. Taken together, these findings confirm the prominent status of onsets in musical instrument identification, but suggest that rapidly varying transients are less indicative of instrument identity compared to the relatively slow buildup of sinusoidal components during onsets.
Highlights
It is a common idea in music psychoacoustics that timbre cues at sound onsets are of central importance for the identification of musical instruments by human listeners
Average performance in the stationary and transient components (S+T)@0ms signal condition was around seven percentage points below the training score (M = .77) and slightly higher compared to the S@0ms condition (M = .71)
In the S+T@128ms signal condition, there was a strong inflation of confusions (M = .52)
Summary
It is a common idea in music psychoacoustics that timbre cues at sound onsets are of central importance for the identification of musical instruments by human listeners. The radio engineer and musician Pierre Schaeffer pioneered in testing the perceptual implications of different temporal gatings of sounds (cf., Schaeffer, 2017) and made the observation that sounds such as piano tones lose aspects of their identity if presented bare of onsets. This has led to the idea that onset information is perceptually more valuable compared to other sound components that are present in the so-called steady state, the portion of a tone where its waveform (or short-time spectrum) is relatively constant. Transients are defined as short-lived and chaotic bursts of acoustical energy, such as the sound of the hammer hitting the piano string (without the sound from the harmonically vibrating string)
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