Musical Instrument Sounds Research Articles

Stimulus expectancy modulates inferior frontal gyrus and premotor cortex activity in auditory perception

In studies on auditory speech perception, participants are often asked to perform active tasks, e.g. decide whether the perceived sound is a speech sound or not. However, information about the stimulus, inherent in such tasks, may induce expectations that cause altered activations not only in the auditory cortex, but also in frontal areas such as inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and motor cortices, even in the absence of an explicit task. To investigate this, we applied spectral mixes of a flute sound and either vowels or specific music instrument sounds (e.g. trumpet) in an fMRI study, in combination with three different instructions. The instructions either revealed no information about stimulus features, or explicit information about either the music instrument or the vowel features. The results demonstrated that, besides an involvement of posterior temporal areas, stimulus expectancy modulated in particular a network comprising IFG and premotor cortices during this passive listening task.

Reading Symbolic and Historical Representations in Early Mesoamerica

Reading Symbolic and Historical Representations in Early Mesoamerica Camilla Townsend (bio) Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex Romances de los señores de la Nueva España. Transcribed and translated by John Bierhorst. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 237. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292718524. The Monuments of Piedras Negras, an Ancient Maya City. By Flora Simmons Clancy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 228. $45.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780826344519. The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule. By Lori Boornazian Diel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 160. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292718319. In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico. By Eduardo de J. Douglas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 264. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780292721685. Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca. By Dana Leibsohn. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xv + 199. $55.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780884023616. Social Memory in Ancient and Colonial Mesoamerica. By Amos Megged. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiii + 342. $95.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780521112277. [End Page 177] Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico. By Edward W. Osowski. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 260. $50.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780816528554. Colonial Ch’olti’: The Seventeenth-Century Morán Manuscript. By John S. Robertson, Danny Law, and Robbie A. Haertel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. xiii + 364. $65.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780806141183. Ruins of the Past: The Use and Perception of Abandoned Structures in the Maya Lowlands. Edited by Travis W. Stanton and Aline Magnoni. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008. Pp. xvii + 364. $60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780870818882. 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. Translated and edited by Dennis Tedlock. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xi + 465. $49.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780520232211. For many centuries, the sounds of musical instruments and human voices arose from intricately carved and painted courtyards sprinkled across the Mesoamerican landscape. The audiences there understood themselves to be in the presence of a learning and beauty that we, gazing from our own time and place at the remnants of that world, have been slow to see. In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars working as Mayan epigraphers and translators of sixteenth-century alphabetic texts in Mesoamerican languages at last moved beyond an initial impression that we were confronting the almost mystical self-expression of anointed men who seemed “fundamentally weird” to us. We suddenly recognized that we were reading royal biographies, records of war, and demands for tribute, the stuff of real people’s lives. It was so empowering to move from murkiness (one might even say from science fiction) to clarity and historical comprehension that we are perhaps to be forgiven if we have remained on that page of heady discovery somewhat too long. The consensus seems to be, however, that scholarship should move on. Dennis Tedlock writes in his superb new study, 2000 Years of Mayan Literature: “The time has come to take a further step and proclaim that literature existed in the Americas before the Europeans got here. . . . Much decipherment has taken place but very little in the way of translation” (1). Such thoughts are echoed by scholars in other disciplines, whose works are reviewed in these pages. Flora Simmons Clancy observes, “The ancient sculptors of Piedras Negras were not automatons or simple creatures of a patron; their monuments were artistic creations and cannot be fully understood if they are only considered as products of or for royal aggrandizement” (17). And Eduardo de J. Douglas comments in his work on sixteenth-century Nahuatl visual texts: “Although I isolate what I consider to be figures of speech, ultimately what I argue for is not a set of specific readings or interpretations, but a method of reading that recognizes . . . [that my sources are] literary, specifically poetic, texts as much as historical records subject to verification” (14). Tedlock did not write his book for other epigraphers—although they will find much of interest—or for the...

The Here and Now

In the novel Waterland, the narrator at one point says, Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer a definition - is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all (1983, p. 53). This observation that human beings tell stories - using narratives to create meaning and identity - is a common one in literature and philosophy. It is also important for an understanding of the arts and the role of the educator.Swift s narrator is perhaps a little naive to think that as long as theres a story, everything will be all right. We can be caught up in the stories of others and find ourselves without a speaking part. As we struggle to define our own identities and the identities of our communities, we must usually contend with narratives we have not authored ourselves. Sometimes the dominant storyline is not all right and story-telling must come to the rescue by creating a counter-narrative.Swift's narrator may not be completely right that animals and nature live only in the Here and Now, without memory or history, either. The lives of animals and natural systems bear the imprint of the past too. But, the narrator may be right if he means that only human beings can tell stories about those historical narratives that both constrain and liberate us in the present, and use those stories to re-direct the meaning and impact of those past narratives. Narrative represents both continuity with the past and the potential for transformation.An active grasp of the present requires both the effort to understand the narratives that help to constitute the present and also creative engagement with story-making aimed at the future. While we are unavoidably the inheritors of other people's narratives, we are also the ones who determine the next chapter in those narratives. It is we who participate in deciding what kind of narrative future generations will inherit from us. Identity and meaning are both inherited and created in a rich mixture full of potentiality and danger.As the articles in this issue demonstrate, the narrative construction of identity and meaning can take place through many different media. The story-telling animal is not limited to words alone. Architectural spaces, patterns engraved on ceramic funeral urns, landscape paintings, videos, self-portraits, public shrines, the sounds of musical instruments, can all tell a story and embody narrative meaning for an individual or a community.The authors of the articles in this issue all address, in one way or another, the importance of narrative within the context of art education. They illustrate how various media can be used to enhance students' ability to articulate their own identity and to find meaning around them. In the process, their relationship to the narratives structuring their lives and opportunities can change in radical and liberatory ways.Sharif Bey discusses how diverse forms of visual culture can be used to mourn and memorialize victims of violence. His study of residents of Beltzhoover, on Pittsburgh's Southside, helps us to understand how the marking of walls, the inking of skin, and the spontaneous construction of public shrines tells the stories of individuals who lived and died in this neighborhood. …

Skewed alpha-stable distributions for modeling and classification of musical instruments

Music information retrieval and particularly musical instrument classification has become a very popular research area for the last few decades. Although in the literature many feature sets have been proposed to represent the musical instrument sounds, there is still need to find a superior feature set to achieve better classification performance. In this paper, we propose to use the parameters of skewed alpha-stable distribution of sub-band wavelet coefficients of musical sounds as features and show the effectiveness of this new feature set for musical instrument classification. We compare the classification performance with the features constructed from the parameters of generalized Gaussian density and some of the state-of-the-art features using support vector machine classifiers.

Musical Instrument Sound Multi-Excitation Model for Non-Negative Spectrogram Factorization

This paper presents theoretical and experimental results about constrained non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) to model the excitation of the musical instruments. These excitations represent vibrating objects, while the filter represents the resonance structure of the instrument, which colors the produced sound. We propose to model the excitations as the weighted sum of harmonically constrained basis functions, whose parameters are tied across different pitches of an instrument. An NMF-based framework is used to learn the model parameters. We assume that the excitations of a well-tempered instrument should possess an identifiable characteristic structure whereas the conditions of the music scene might produce variations in the filter. In order to test the reliability of our proposal, we evaluate our method for a music transcription task in two scenarios. On the first one, comparison with state-of-the-art methods has been performed over a dataset of piano recordings obtaining more accurate results than other NMF-based algorithms. On the second one, two woodwind instrument databases have been used to demonstrate the benefits of our model in comparison with previous excitation-filter model approaches.

Numerical simulation of the sound of organ pipes

Numerical simulations of musical instrument sounds are useful in studies, when questions about the influence of physical parameters stand in first place. Differential equations can be used to solve the given problem. The results given as a discrete sequence can be stored in audiofiles and made audible. In the current project, the influence of the attack of organ pipes with respect to the reverb time of the acoustical environment in the church building is studied by different numerical calculation methods such as finite element method and computational fluid dynamics. The resulting sound pressure and the velocity in a vortex street of the jet emerging from a pipe can be calculated at different listening positions. The computation allows also visualization of the jet in a three dimensional view. In the tests, the same parameters used by organ builders to voice organs are used for the simulation. Main point is the strength of the resulting starting transient and its influence to the acoustical environment. The calculation process which includes the synthesizing and adding a reverb and the results with different voicing parameters will be presented.

Virtual Gesture Control and Synthesis of Music Performances: Qualitative Evaluation of Synthesized Timpani Exercises

The increasing availability of software for creating real-time simulations of musical instrument sounds allows for the design of new visual and sounding media. These past decades have especially focused on the control of real and virtual instruments by natural gestures. In this paper, we present and extensively evaluate a framework (Figure 1) for the control of virtual percussion instruments, by modeling and simulating virtual percussionists gestures. By positioning the virtual performer at the center of the gesture-sound synthesis system, we aim at providing original tools to analyze and synthesize instrumental gesture performances. Our physics-based approach for gesture simulation brings some insight into the effect of biomechanical parameters of the gesture on the instrumental performance. Simulating both gesture and sound by physical models leads also to a coherent and human-centered interaction and provides new ways of exploring the mapping between gesture and sound. The use of motion capture data enables the realistic synthesis of both pre-recorded and novel percussion sequences from the specification of gesture scores. Such scores involve motion editing techniques applied to simple beat attacks. We therefore propose an original gesture language based on the instrumental playing techniques. This language is characterized by expressivity, interactivity with the user, and the possibility to take into account co-articulation between gesture units. Finally, providing 3D visual rendering synchronized with sound rendering allows us to observe virtual performances to the light of real ones, and to qualitatively evaluate both pedagogical and compositional capabilities of such a system.

Wavelet ridges for musical instrument classification

The time-varying frequency structure of musical signals have been analyzed using wavelets by either extracting the instantaneous frequency of signals or building features from the energies of sub-band coefficients. We propose to benefit from a combination of these two approaches and use the time-frequency domain energy localization curves, called as wavelet ridges, in order to build features for classification of musical instrument sounds. We evaluated the representative capability of our feature in different musical instrument classification problems using support vector machine classifiers. The comparison with the features based on parameterizing the wavelet sub-band energies confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed feature.

An Approach to Multi-Pitch Estimation Using a Support Vector Machine

In this paper, an approach to multi-pitch estimation using a support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. For automatic music transcription, an SVM is used often for identifying the sounds of musical instruments but rarely for estimation of the pitch – the fundamental frequency. Our approach is based on the SVM characteristic of finding the ideal hypersurface that separates the input vectors into two classes. The proposed system achieves multi-pitch estimation by effectively using the margins between the hypersurfaces and the input vectors. In addition, our system does not require chord sounds for the SVM training instances. Experiments using sound data generated by artificially compounding real audio signals show that the proposed method drastically reduces the number of training instances.

Reproduction of real musical instrument sounds by a spherical loudspeaker with 26 transducers : Acoustic comparison on reproducibility of sound radiation patterns of musical instruments

Reproduction of real musical instrument sounds by a spherical loudspeaker with 26 transducers : Acoustic comparison on reproducibility of sound radiation patterns of musical instruments

Increased activation in superior temporal gyri as a function of increment in phonetic features

A common assumption is that phonetic sounds initiate unique processing in the superior temporal gyri and sulci (STG/STS). The anatomical areas subserving these processes are also implicated in the processing of non-phonetic stimuli such as music instrument sounds. The differential processing of phonetic and non-phonetic sounds was investigated in this study by applying a “sound-morphing” paradigm, where the presence of phonetic features were parametrically varied, creating a step-wise transition from a non-phonetic sound into a phonetic sound. The stimuli were presented in an event-related fMRI design. The fMRI-BOLD data were analysed using parametric contrasts. The results showed a higher sensitivity for sounds containing phonetic features compared to non-phonetic sounds in the middle part of STG, and in the anterior part of the planum temporale (PT) bilaterally. Although the same areas were involved in the processing of non-phonetic sounds, a difference in activation was evident in the STG, with an increase in activation related to increment of phonetic features in the sounds. The results indicate a stimulus-driven, bottom-up process that utilizes general auditory resources in the secondary auditory cortex, depending on specific phonetic features in the sounds.

A method for comparing sounds of similar instruments.

Although the radiated sound of similar musical instruments (e.g., two recorders made by the same maker) can be compared using an artificial excitation apparatus to eliminate a player‐induced effect on the sound, this introduces another problem. Even if differences are found, the question remains as to whether these differences are musically significant: Would the musician not be able to compensate for these differences, making them irrelevant? One way of overcoming this problem is to have a musician play the instruments in a manner as close to that of real performance as possible. This paper presents a method for comparing the sounds of similar musical instruments, whereby a musician is asked to play a known piece many times on each instrument. The radiated sounds are recorded and subsequently spectrum‐analyzed using the program SNDAN. Later on, time‐varying parameters such as the rms amplitude, fundamental frequency, and spectral centroid as well as average and standard deviations of these parameters are calculated for each recorded sample for each instrument. Statistical tests are made in order to establish whether statistically significant differences between the instruments exist. Examples of this method will be presented.

Cortical Representation of Natural Complex Sounds: Effects of Acoustic Features and Auditory Object Category

How the brain processes complex sounds, like voices or musical instrument sounds, is currently not well understood. The features comprising the acoustic profiles of such sounds are thought to be represented by neurons responding to increasing degrees of complexity throughout auditory cortex, with complete auditory "objects" encoded by neurons (or small networks of neurons) in anterior superior temporal regions. Although specialized voice and speech-sound regions have been proposed, it is unclear how other types of complex natural sounds are processed within this object-processing pathway. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we sought to demonstrate spatially distinct patterns of category-selective activity in human auditory cortex, independent of semantic content and low-level acoustic features. Category-selective responses were identified in anterior superior temporal regions, consisting of clusters selective for musical instrument sounds and for human speech. An additional subregion was identified that was particularly selective for the acoustic-phonetic content of speech. In contrast, regions along the superior temporal plane closer to primary auditory cortex were not selective for stimulus category, responding instead to specific acoustic features embedded in natural sounds, such as spectral structure and temporal modulation. Our results support a hierarchical organization of the anteroventral auditory-processing stream, with the most anterior regions representing the complete acoustic signature of auditory objects.

A Modeling of Singing Voice Robust to Accompaniment Sounds and Its Application to Singer Identification and Vocal-Timbre-Similarity-Based Music Information Retrieval

This paper describes a method of modeling the characteristics of a singing voice from polyphonic musical audio signals including sounds of various musical instruments. Because singing voices play an important role in musical pieces with vocals, such representation is useful for music information retrieval systems. The main problem in modeling the characteristics of a singing voice is the negative influences caused by accompaniment sounds. To solve this problem, we developed two methods, accompaniment sound reduction and reliable frame selection . The former makes it possible to calculate feature vectors that represent a spectral envelope of a singing voice after reducing accompaniment sounds. It first extracts the harmonic components of the predominant melody from sound mixtures and then resynthesizes the melody by using a sinusoidal model driven by these components. The latter method then estimates the reliability of frame of the obtained melody (i.e., the influence of accompaniment sound) by using two Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) for vocal and nonvocal frames to select the reliable vocal portions of musical pieces. Finally, each song is represented by its GMM consisting of the reliable frames. This new representation of the singing voice is demonstrated to improve the performance of an automatic singer identification system and to achieve an MIR system based on vocal timbre similarity.

Dynamic Spectral Envelope Modeling for Timbre Analysis of Musical Instrument Sounds

We present a computational model of musical instrument sounds that focuses on capturing the dynamic behavior of the spectral envelope. A set of spectro-temporal envelopes belonging to different notes of each instrument are extracted by means of sinusoidal modeling and subsequent frequency interpolation, before being subjected to principal component analysis. The prototypical evolution of the envelopes in the obtained reduced-dimensional space is modeled as a nonstationary Gaussian Process. This results in a compact representation in the form of a set of prototype curves in feature space, or equivalently of prototype spectro-temporal envelopes in the time-frequency domain. Finally, the obtained models are successfully evaluated in the context of two music content analysis tasks: classification of instrument samples and detection of instruments in monaural polyphonic mixtures.

Representing Musical Sounds With an Interpolating State Model

A computationally efficient algorithm is proposed for modeling and representing time-varying musical sounds. The aim is to encode individual sounds and not the statistical properties of several sounds representing a certain class. A given sequence of acoustic feature vectors is modeled by finding such a set of ?states? (anchor points in the feature space) that the input data can be efficiently represented by interpolating between them. The proposed interpolating state model is generic and can be used to represent any multidimensional data sequence. In this paper, it is applied to represent musical instrument sounds in a compact and accurate form. Simulation experiments were carried out which show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the conventional vector quantization approach where the acoustic feature data is k-means clustered and the feature vectors are replaced by the corresponding cluster centroids. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm as a function of the input sequence length T is O(T log T).

Simulation of Directional Microphones in Digital Waveguide Mesh-Based Models of Room Acoustics

Digital waveguide mesh (DWM) models are time-domain numerical methods providing computationally simple solutions for wave propagation problems. They have been used in various acoustical modeling and audio synthesis applications including synthesis of musical instrument sounds and speech, and modeling of room acoustics. A successful model of room acoustics should be able to account for source and receiver directivity. Methods for the simulation of directional sources in DWM models were previously proposed. This paper presents a method for the simulation of directional microphones in DWM-based models of room acoustics. The method is based on the directional weighting of the microphone response according to the instantaneous direction of incidence at a given point. The direction of incidence is obtained from instantaneous intensity that is calculated from local pressure values in the DWM model. The calculation of instantaneous intensity in DWM meshes and the directional accuracies of different mesh topologies are discussed. An intensity-based formulation for the response of a directional microphone is given. Simulation results for an actual microphone with frequency-dependent, non-ideal directivity function are presented.

Bayesian Pitch

Event Abstract Back to Event Bayesian Pitch Phillipp Hehrmann1* and Maneesh Sahani1 1 UCL, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, United Kingdom Pitch is a fundamental perceptual attribute of many sounds. It carries melodic, prosodic and sometimes semantic information, and contributes to auditory scene analysis. However, over a century of study has failed to yield a generally-accepted definition of pitch and model of its perception. No single physical feature of the acoustic waveform correlates perfectly with the reported pitch for all tested sounds, raising the question of whether pitch perception instead relies on a combination of several different features, and in turn, mechanisms. Three implicated features are harmonic regularities in the spectrum, periodicity of the waveform envelope, and the timing of fine structure peaks within the envelope. Here, we propose a computationally unified account of pitch perception. Our hypothesis is that the pitch of a sound is a Bayesian estimate of its periodicity, as inferred from the resulting time-varying auditory nerve firing rates. Inference proceeds within a generative model in which pitched sounds are first formed by convolving a regular train of impulses with a randomly drawn impulse-response and adding Gaussian noise. These sounds are then transformed to auditory nerve activity by a cascade of bandpass filters and demodulators, corrupted by further noise. This generative process describes responses to many naturally occurring pitched sounds such as voiced speech, vocalisations and musical instrument sounds. We suggest that the aberrant or ambiguous pitch percepts reported for some laboratory constructed sounds arise because the auditory system infers periodicity assuming this same generative model, even when it does not apply. To test our hypothesis, we chose three types of stimuli to exemplify the three physical cues listed above. Evidence for the importance of spectral features comes from harmonic complex sounds with missing fundamental f0. The pitch of these sounds corresponds to f0, but its strength varies depending on the number of the lowest harmonic present in the spectrum. Evidence for temporal envelope periodicity comes from amplitude modulated noise, which is weakly pitched despite the complete lack of spectral features. Finally, the timing of fine structure peaks must be invoked to explain the ambiguous pitch of amplitude modulated pure tones, which corresponds neither exactly to the envelope modulation rate nor to the spacing of spectral components. In all three cases, our Bayesian periodicity estimate provides a good match with human pitch perception, demonstrating that the model can indeed utilise spectral, temporal envelope and temporal fine structure cues within a single computational framework. Notably, the effect of model mismatch in case of the amplitude modulated tone and noise stimuli are also consistent with human pitch perception, lending further support to our hypothesis. Viewing pitch perception as probabilistic inference relates pitch to an unobserved, yet real physical quantity and provides a normative interpretation of its role in auditory perception, rather than a purely phenomenological match. Whilst this interpretation does not address the issue of neural implementation, it suggests that different neural mechanisms, should they exist, are set up together in a way to achieve a single computational goal. Conference: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010, Salt Lake City, UT, United States, 25 Feb - 2 Mar, 2010. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster session II Citation: Hehrmann P and Sahani M (2010). Bayesian Pitch. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Computational and Systems Neuroscience 2010. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.03.00199 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 03 Mar 2010; Published Online: 03 Mar 2010. * Correspondence: Phillipp Hehrmann, UCL, Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London, United Kingdom, hehrmann@gatsby.ucl.ac.uk Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Phillipp Hehrmann Maneesh Sahani Google Phillipp Hehrmann Maneesh Sahani Google Scholar Phillipp Hehrmann Maneesh Sahani PubMed Phillipp Hehrmann Maneesh Sahani Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Human and Musical Sounds and Their Hearing Elsewhere as a Literary Device in the Biblical Narratives

AbstractThe biblical narrators utilize sounds of musical instruments and/or human voices being raised emotionally and their being heard someplace else as a literary tool and transitioning the reader from one place or group of people to another. The article discusses this literary tool as it appears in a number of narratives in the Hebrew Bible (namely, the Joseph Story, Ark Narrative, Throne Succession Narrative, Deuteronomistic and Chronistic histories, as well as the book of Ezra), and its effects.

THE DISCRIMINATION OF OBJECT NAMES AND OBJECT SOUNDS IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM: A PROCEDURE FOR TEACHING VERBAL COMPREHENSION

We assessed whether 2 preschoolers with autism learned to discriminate between the sounds of musical instruments more rapidly than the spoken names of the instruments. After the children learned the sound-object relations more rapidly than the name-object relations, we then evaluated a prompt-delay procedure for transferring stimulus control from the sounds to the names of the instruments. The prompt-delay procedure facilitated the acquisition of name-object relations for both children.