Timbre: A better musical analogy to speech

Abstract

A recurring claim in speech research has been that “speech is special”—different perceptual processing is involved for speech than for other acoustic stimuli. In response to this claim, several demonstrations of speech‐like results have been reported for nonspeech stimuli, including musical intervals (e.g., major versus minor chords), and manner of playing a string (e.g., pluck versus bow). The research to be reported explores another, possibly more appropriate, musical analog: timbre. The notion is that families of instruments (e.g., horns, strings) may be analogous to families of phonemes (e.g., liquids, stops, fricatives). To test this notion, stimuli were synthesized to sound like various instruments. Standard speech experiments were then conducted, including forced‐choice identification, ABX discrimination, duplex perception, selective adaptation, and paired contrast. The similarity of the obtained results to those for speech will be reported, and the implications of these findings for theories of speech perception will be discussed. [Work supported by AFOSR.]