Timbre Of Musical Instruments Research Articles

Analyzing musical tones with fourier transformation

This essay delves into the mathematical exploration of musical tones through the application of Fourier Transformation, a pivotal tool in the field of digital signal processing and acoustics. By converting complex musical tones from the time domain to the frequency domain, Fourier Transformation enables the deconstruction of sounds into their constituent frequencies, revealing the unique harmonic structures that contribute to the characteristic timbre of different musical instruments. The focus of this analysis is particularly on the trumpet, chosen for its rich harmonic content and distinctive sound. Through the examination of audio recordings, this study uncovers the fundamental frequency and harmonics of the trumpet, demonstrating how these elements combine to form its unique acoustic fingerprint. The process involves recording, analyzing, and comparing musical tones using software tools like MATLAB and Python, providing an accessible yet profound insight into the intersection of mathematics and music. This essay not only highlights the technical methodology of Fourier Transformation in analyzing musical tones but also explores its practical applications in music theory, digital audio processing, and the broader field of acoustics. The findings underscore the transformative power of mathematical analysis in understanding and appreciating the complex beauty of musical sounds, opening avenues for further research and application in both the scientific and artistic domains.

Synthesis and Restoration of Traditional Ethnic Musical Instrument Timbres Based on Time-Frequency Analysis

Synthesis and Restoration of Traditional Ethnic Musical Instrument Timbres Based on Time-Frequency Analysis

“The Power of Harmony” by Eusebius Mandyczewski as an example of the composer’s early cantata work

Statement of the problem. The artistic work of the Bukovynian composer and musicologist of the second half of the 19th – the first quarter of the 20th century Eusebius Mandyczewski plays an important role in the formation and development of the composer school of Bukovyna. The study of the cantata “The Power of Harmony” – one of Mandyczewski’s early works – is important, because it allows us to reveal the fundamentals, which contributed to his future artistic growth. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the study is a musicological analysis of the cantata “The Power of Harmony” by E. Mandyczewski and identification the characteristic features of the composer’s creative thinking. Such detailed analysis of the work revealing the characteristic features of the artistic style of the Bukovynian composer is the innovative component of the research. A set of methods that are important for identifying the features of a composer’s musical work was used: biographical, historical and cultural, method of musicological analysis, method of theoretical generalization. Results and conclusion. The artistic heritage of E. Mandyczewski is quite large, it covers various genres of musical work, but the most important one is the cantata genre. The study of the cantata “The Power of Harmony” revealed a number of features of the work and the stylistic foundations of the composer’s future mature work. The author demonstrated the skill of creating monumental genres and the ability to perform complex artistic tasks in a short period of time. We observe clear dramaturgy of the cantata, which is aimed at embodying the main idea of the work – an allegorical comparison of the harmony of the world, which grew out of chaos, with the formation of the musical culture of the Bukovynian region. This work reveals the composer’s romantic worldview, knowledge of the musical heritage of Western Europe, the style of foreign composers, and mastery of traditional writing techniques. E. Mandyczewski demonstrated the ability to operate a large group of performers, skillfully using the timbre of vocal voices and musical instruments. The expressiveness of the vocal melody is combined with the improvisation and virtuosity of individual instruments, in particular the violin, which is characteristic of the local performance tradition. High level of professionalism of the composer his mastery of the polyphonic writing technique attests: the use of polyphonic methods and forms, in particular the choral fugue, the use of timbre polyphony, etc. In the cantata “The Power of Harmony”, E. Mandyczewski, despite his young age, showed talent and professional mastery of instrumentation, harmony and counterpoint, as well as knowledge of the nature of the human voice. This early composer’s cantata was a great success during the first performance that gave the composer an impetus for future achievements.

Scientific mechanism of bamboo acoustic vibration performance from structure-chemical perspective

The special melodious timbre of bamboo musical instruments is closely related to the multi-level, multi-scale, delicate structure of bamboo. In this study, the influence of different excitation surfaces, bamboo height, and bamboo age on acoustic vibration performance was investigated. The mechanism of the influence of the bamboo tissue structure on its acoustic properties was further investigated. The results show that the acoustic conversion efficiency (ACE) of the bamboo-green side is 1307.42 m4/kg·s, which is higher than that of the bamboo-yellow side (1218.60 m4/kg·s). The E'/G' ratio from the bamboo-green side is 8.21, lower than that of the bamboo-yellow side (8.45). The comprehensive acoustic performance near the root (0–1.6 m) of the plant is optimal and has the maximum ACE value; ACE value decreases gradually from root to tip. The comprehensive acoustic properties of 8-year-old bamboo are the best compared to other ages. The ACE values of 2-year-old, 5-year-old, and 8-year-old bamboo are 997.37 m4/kg·s, 1284.19 m4/kg·s, and 1355.82 m4/kg·s with E'/G' of 8.34, 8.64, and 9.49, respectively. A highly oriented vascular fiber is conductive to the vibrational efficiency of bamboo, while loose and porous parenchyma cells play a resonant and tonal role. Highly oriented microfibrils and a large number of pores with diameter > 50 nm create a sound transmission channel and resonance cavity, which is the structural basis of the clear timbre of bamboo. However, a damping dissipation effect is produced affecting the vibration capacity and vibration energy transfer of the cellulose microfibril when abundant pores < 50 nm in size are located in lignin and between hemicellulose and cellulose skeletons. The content of the matrix composed of hemicellulose and lignin in the cell wall creates a chemical material basis that affects the acoustic performance of bamboo. The structural characteristics of bamboo, including directional gradient structure, fiber-parenchyma two-phase composite structure, and muli-scale pore structure, as well as key chemical “rebar-cement-sand” components of the rigid cellulose macromolecular chain, viscoelastic hemicellulose, and lignin have synergistic effects on bamboo acoustic vibration performance.

Pitch discrimination is better for synthetic timbre than natural musical instrument timbres despite familiarity.

Pitch discrimination is better for complex tones than pure tones, but how pitch discrimination differs between natural and artificial sounds is not fully understood. This study compared pitch discrimination thresholds for flat-spectrum harmonic complex tones with those for natural sounds played by musical instruments of three different timbres (violin, trumpet, and flute). To investigate whether natural familiarity with sounds of particular timbres affects pitch discrimination thresholds, this study recruited non-musicians and musicians who were trained on one of the three instruments. We found that flautists and trumpeters could discriminate smaller differences in pitch for artificial flat-spectrum tones, despite their unfamiliar timbre, than for sounds played by musical instruments, which are regularly heard in everyday life (particularly by musicians who play those instruments). Furthermore, thresholds were no better for the instrument a musician was trained to play than for other instruments, suggesting that even extensive experience listening to and producing sounds of particular timbres does not reliably improve pitch discrimination thresholds for those timbres. The results show that timbre familiarity provides minimal improvements to auditory acuity, and physical acoustics (e.g., the presence of equal-amplitude harmonics) determine pitch discrimination thresholds more than does experience with natural sounds and timbre-specific training.

Construction of Vocal Timbre Evaluation System Based on Classification Algorithm

With the continuous development of communication technology, computer technology, and network technology, a large amount of information such as images, videos, and audios has grown exponentially, and people have started to be exposed to massive multimedia contents, which can easily and quickly access the increasingly rich music resources, so new technologies are urgently needed for their effective management, and automatic classification of audio signals has become the focus of engineering and academic attention. Currently, music retrieval can be achieved by selecting song titles and singer names, but as people’s living standards continue to improve, the spiritual realm is also enriched. People want to be able to select music with different types of emotional expressions with their emotions. It mainly includes the basic principles of audio classification, the analysis and extraction of music emotion features, and the selection of the best classifier. Two classification algorithms, hybrid Gaussian model and AdaBoost, are used to classify music emotions, and the two classifiers are combined. In this paper, we propose the Discrete Harmonic Transform (DHT), a sparse transform based on harmonic frequencies. This paper derives and proves the formula of Discrete Harmonic Transform and further analyzes the harmonic structure of musical tone signal and the accuracy of harmonic structure. Since the timbre of musical instruments depends on the harmonic structure, and similar instruments have similar harmonic structures, the discrete harmonic transform coefficients can be defined as objective indicators corresponding to the timbre of musical instruments, and thus the concept of timbre expression spectrum is proposed, and a specific construction algorithm is given in this paper. In the application of musical instrument recognition, the 53-dimensional combined features of LPCC, MFCC, and timbre expression spectrum are selected, and a nonlinear support vector machine is used as the classifier. The classification recognition rate is improved by reducing the number of feature dimensions.

Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with timbre trait profiles

This paper offers a series of characterizations of prototypical musical timbres, called Timbre Trait Profiles, for 34 musical instruments common in Western orchestras and wind ensembles. These profiles represent the results of a study in which 243 musician participants imagined the sounds of various instruments and used the 20-dimensional model of musical instrument timbre qualia proposed by Reymore and Huron (2020) to rate their auditory image of each instrument. The rating means are visualized through radar plots, which provide timbral-linguistic thumbprints, and are summarized through snapshot profiles, which catalog the six highest- and three lowest-rated descriptors. The Euclidean distances among instruments offer a quantitative operationalization of semantic distances; these distances are illustrated through hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to analyze the latent structure of the rating data. Finally, results are used to assess Reymore and Huron’s 20-dimensional timbre qualia model, suggesting that the model is highly reliable. It is anticipated that the Timbre Trait Profiles can be applied in future perceptual/cognitive research on timbre and orchestration, in music theoretical analysis for both close readings and corpus studies, and in orchestration pedagogy.

ANALISA GAYA LAGU KLASIK GAMBANG KROMONG “POBIN KONG JI LOK’

Nowadays, the existing repertoire of the classic songs of gambang kromong is very apprehensive. Dozens of gambang kromong's classical songs developed comprehensively at the end of the 18th century, but in the present, there is only one song that is still possible to play, namely "Pobin Kong Ji Lok". Even, as a matter of fact, this song can only be played by an old music player. Based on the aforementioned problems, it is necessary to conduct documentation of "Pobin Kong Ji Lok" song, associated with an analysis of its musical style. "Pobin Kong Ji Lok" will be documented in the form of audiovisual, transcribed in the form of notation, then analyzed its style of music through the most prominent musical elements, including the musical scale, harmony, tuning system, rhythm, and the timbre of musical instruments.

Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials.

Music and speech both communicate emotional meanings in addition to their domain-specific contents. But it is not clear whether and how the two kinds of emotional meanings are linked. The present study is focused on exploring the emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody. The stimuli were isolated instrument sounds and emotional speech prosody categorized by listeners into anger, happiness and sadness, respectively. We first analyzed the timbral features of the stimuli, which showed that relations between the three emotions were relatively consistent in those features for speech and music. The results further echo the size-code hypothesis in which different sound timbre indicates different body size projections. Then we conducted an ERP experiment using a priming paradigm with isolated instrument sounds as primes and emotional speech prosody as targets. The results showed that emotionally incongruent instrument-speech pairs triggered a larger N400 response than emotionally congruent pairs. Taken together, this is the first study to provide evidence that the timbre of simple and isolated musical instrument sounds can convey emotion in a way similar to emotional speech prosody.

Human dissimilarity ratings of musical instrument timbre: A computational meta-analysis

Musical instrument timbre has been intensively investigated through dissimilarity rating tasks. It is now well known that audio descriptors such as attack time and spectral centroid, among others, account well for the dimensions of the timbre spaces underlying these dissimilarity ratings. Nevertheless, it remains very difficult to reproduce these perceptual judgments from distances computed on acoustical representations such as the waveform or the spectrogram. Interestingly, biologically inspired representations based on spectrotemporal modulation spectra such as spectrotemporal receptive fields (STRF) have been shown to be well-suited to reproduce human dissimilarity ratings (Patil et al., 2012). Here, we propose a meta-analysis of seven former studies on timbre spaces in light of these recently developed representations. We implemented a computational framework that optimizes the correlation between the perceptual results and distances obtained from a set of different acoustic representations, in particular through the STRF. We observed that distances computed from spectrotemporal modulation representations provide the best correlation with the perceptual results across the seven timbre spaces. Finally, we highlighted the parts of the representations contributing the most to the correlation suggesting new insights into the underlying perceptual metrics. [Supported by Canada Research Chair, NSERC (RGPIN-2015-05208, RGPAS-478121-15), (RGPIN-262808-2012), and EU MSCf (Project MIM, H2020-MSCA-IF-2014, GA no. 659).]

Masculine harps and feminine horns: Timbre and pitch level influence gender ratings of musical instruments

We examined whether timbre (instrument), pitch level, or both influence gender ratings of musical instruments. According to previous research, a variety of musical instruments are categorized or rated as masculine, neutral, or feminine in a relatively consistent way. Gender associations to musical instruments have been rather reliable across time and across participant populations. We investigated the gender ratings of nine musical instruments (three masculine, three neutral, and three feminine) each heard at low, medium, and high pitch levels within the playable range of each instrument. Both timbre and pitch level influenced participants’ gender ratings. The effect of timbre is consistent with results of previous studies, further demonstrating that participants rate instruments fairly consistently. One novel finding is that pitch level also played a role in participants’ gender ratings. The ratings of all instruments heard in low pitch levels were shifted in the masculine direction, and the ratings of all instruments heard in high pitch levels were shifted in the feminine direction. These results provide evidence for the notion that participants are influenced by associations to both timbre and pitch level when rating musical instruments on gender.

Expertise shapes domain-specific functional cerebral asymmetry during mental imagery: the case of culinary arts and music.

Mental imagery in experts has been documented in visual arts, music and dance. Here, we examined this issue in an understudied art domain, namely, culinary arts. Previous research investigating mental imagery in experts has reported either a stronger involvement of the right hemisphere or bilateral brain activation. The first aim of our study was to examine whether culinary arts also recruit such a hemispheric pattern specifically during odor mental imagery. In a second aim, we investigated whether expertise effects observed in a given sensory domain transfer to another modality. We combined psychophysics and neurophysiology to study mental imagery in cooks, musicians and controls. We collected response times and event-related potentials (ERP) while participants mentally compared the odor of fruits, the timbre of musical instruments and the size of fruits, musical instruments and manufactured objects. Cooks were faster in imagining fruit odors, and musicians were faster in imagining the timbre of musical instruments. These differences were not observed in control participants. This expertise effect was reflected in the ERP late positive complex (LPC): only experts showed symmetric bilateral activation, specifically when cooks imagined odors and when musicians imagined timbres. In contrast, the LPC was significantly greater in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere for non-expert participants in all conditions. These findings suggest that sensory expertise does not involve transfer of mental imagery ability across modalities and highlight for the first time that olfactory expertise in cooks induces a balance of activations between hemispheres as does musical expertise in musicians.

Viscoelastic internal damping finite-difference model for musical instruments physical model sound production

A viscoelastic model for the internal damping of musical instrument parts, like membranes or plates is implemented within a Finite-Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. Internal damping of wood, leather, nylon, mylar, glue, or varnish strongly change the timbre of musical instruments and the precise spectrum of this damping contributes strongly to the individual instrument character. The model assumes a complex, frequency-dependent and linear stiffness in the frequency domain, which is analytically transferred into the time-domain using a Laplace transform. The resulting mass-weighted restoring force integral of the respective membrane or plate differential equation is solved using a circular buffer accumulation method for each spatial node on the geometry, which is effective, as the model is implemented on a massive parallel Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). The model is able to reproduce arbitrarily shaped internal damping frequency responses with sharp bandwidth and fast response. The model is also able to reproduce other energy distribution problems, like energy loss or even energy supply by different parts of musical instruments through coupling, time-dependent energy loss and supply behavior, or nonlinear damping behavior, like amplitude-dependent loss strength. So also internal damping of metamaterials can be calculated with this model.

Perceptually Salient Regions of the Modulation Power Spectrum for Musical Instrument Identification.

The ability of a listener to recognize sound sources, and in particular musical instruments from the sounds they produce, raises the question of determining the acoustical information used to achieve such a task. It is now well known that the shapes of the temporal and spectral envelopes are crucial to the recognition of a musical instrument. More recently, Modulation Power Spectra (MPS) have been shown to be a representation that potentially explains the perception of musical instrument sounds. Nevertheless, the question of which specific regions of this representation characterize a musical instrument is still open. An identification task was applied to two subsets of musical instruments: tuba, trombone, cello, saxophone, and clarinet on the one hand, and marimba, vibraphone, guitar, harp, and viola pizzicato on the other. The sounds were processed with filtered spectrotemporal modulations with 2D Gaussian windows. The most relevant regions of this representation for instrument identification were determined for each instrument and reveal the regions essential for their identification. The method used here is based on a “molecular approach,” the so-called bubbles method. Globally, the instruments were correctly identified and the lower values of spectrotemporal modulations are the most important regions of the MPS for recognizing instruments. Interestingly, instruments that were confused with each other led to non-overlapping regions and were confused when they were filtered in the most salient region of the other instrument. These results suggest that musical instrument timbres are characterized by specific spectrotemporal modulations, information which could contribute to music information retrieval tasks such as automatic source recognition.

Perceptually salient spectrotemporal modulations for recognition of sustained musical instruments.

Modulation Power Spectra include dimensions of spectral and temporal modulation that contribute significantly to the perception of musical instrument timbres. Nevertheless, it remains unknown whether each instrument's identity is characterized by specific regions in this representation. A recognition task was applied to tuba, trombone, cello, saxophone, and clarinet sounds resynthesized with filtered spectrotemporal modulations. The most relevant parts of this representation for instrument identification were determined for each instrument. In addition, instruments that were confused with each other led to non-overlapping spectrotemporal modulation regions, suggesting that musical instrument timbres are characterized by specific spectrotemporal modulations.

The influence of timbre of string instruments and piano on successful transcription of one-part and multi-part melodic dictation at musical studies

The paper analyses the influence and contribution of tone colour (timbre) of various musical instruments on successful notation of one-part and multi-part melodic dictation in solfeggio teaching during musical studies. An experimental pilot research tested the impact of tone colour of the most prevalent teaching tools - the piano, on the one hand, and the timbre of string instruments on the other - on the accuracy of identification of tone pitches, and therefore the accuracy of transcribing musical dictation. The research was based on the experiment with parallel groups on a sample of eighteen students of the second and fourth year of Faculty of Philology and Arts in Kragujevac. The students were divided into two groups - control and experimental group in each generation. The pilot research results prove that the use of timbre of string instruments provides greater accuracy of solving tests - writing multi-part (two-part and three-part) melodic dictation.

Effects of fundamental frequency removal and low-pass filtering on pitch comparisons.

Pitch has been defined as perceptual attribute which allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale ordered from low to high (Klapuri & Davy, 2006; p. 8). A primary acoustic dimension for determining the pitch of complex periodic sounds is fundamental frequency (Stevens & Volkmann, 1940; Idson & Massaro, 1978). Relationships between the spectral components of complex tones also contribute to pitch. Harmonic relations, in particular, strengthen the sensation of pitch (Plomp, 1976; Terhardt, 1974).In contrast, timbre traditionally has been defined by exclusion. For example, the American Standards Association (1960) defines timbre as attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which a listener can judge that two sounds similarly presented and having the same loudness and pitch are dissimilar. Part of the reason for the adherence to the traditional definition of timbre may be that timbre has repeatedly been demonstrated to consist of several perceptual dimensions. Yet, establishing an inclusive definition critically depends on understanding the nature of each of the various dimensions of timbre. Research that has sought to define timbre dimensions has typically involved the multidimensional scaling (MDS) of timbre dissimilarity judgments for musical instrument tones. Reported MDS solutions have tended to converge on several acoustic correlates for the perceptual dimensions of timbre. These associations are summarized below (Caclin, McAdams, Smith, & Winsberg, 2005; Grey, 1977; Krumhansl, 1989; McAdams, Winsberg, Donnadieu, De Soete, & Krimphoff, 1995; Miller & Carterette, 1975). The correspondence between some timbre dimensions and their putative acoustic correlates also has been confirmed by timbre discrimination tasks in response to acoustic manipulations (Grey & Moorer, 1977; also see McAdams, Beauchamp, & Meneguzzi, 1999).Dimensions of musical instrument timbre fall into three broad categories: temporal, spectrotemporal, and spectral.1 Important temporal information is conveyed during the attack portion of a tone, the most salient characteristic of which is the logarithm of rise time. For example, MDS studies have shown that the logarithm of rise time is strongly correlated with a perceptual dimension of timbre (Caclin et al., 2005; Krimphoff, McAdams, & Winsberg, 1994; McAdams et al., 1995). When attack transients are removed (Saldanha & Corso, 1964) or swapped across instru- ments (Thayer, 1974), the accuracy of instrument recognition suffers.The most commonly referenced spectrotemporal dimension is spectral flux, a measure of (the lack of) harmonic stability over the duration of a tone (e.g., see Krumhansl, 1989). However, this dimension has not always significantly correlated with MDS solutions, and sometimes corresponding perceptual dimensions have been accounted for equally well or better by spectral attributes such as spectral irregularity (Krimphoff et ah, 1994) or the relative intensity of odd versus even harmonics (Caclin et al., 2005), both of which contribute to the jaggedness of the spectrum. Several alternative spectrotemporal attributes have been determined to contribute to timbre when controlling for spectral flux, as well as spectral envelope shape and rise time (McAdams et ah, 1999; also see Beauchamp & Lakatos, 2002).The current investigation sought to understand the potential impact on pitch made by spectral timbre information. One primary spectral attribute of timbre is brightness, which is related to the relative amount of higher-frequency energy, and is strongly correlated with spectral centroid, an intensity-weighted average of the frequencies in a tone (Schubert & Wolfe, 2006). Because spectral centroid strongly correlates with a primary perceptual dimension in MDS solutions, it has repeatedly been inferred that listeners use perceived brightness to differentiate between musical instruments (Ehresman & Wessel, 1978). …

Classification of Musical Timbre Using Bayesian Networks

In this article, we explore the use of Bayesian networks for identifying the timbre of musical instruments. Peak spectral amplitude in ten frequency windows is extracted for each of 20 time windows to be used as features. Over a large data set of 24,000 audio examples covering the full musical range of 24 different common orchestral instruments, four different Bayesian network structures, including naive Bayes, are examined and compared with two support vector machines and a k-nearest neighbor classifier. Classification accuracy is examined by instrument, instrument family, and data set size. Bayesian networks with conditional dependencies in the time and frequency dimensions achieved 98 percent accuracy in the instrument classification task and 97 percent accuracy in the instrument family identification task. These results demonstrate a significant improvement over the previous approaches in the literature on this data set. Additionally, we tested our Bayesian approach on the widely used Iowa musical instrument data set, with similar results.

An interactive audio synthesizer for investigating formants and timbre

Computer-based investigations of the nature of formants and their role in characterizing vowel sounds and the timbre of musical instruments will be described. One version of this activity requires students to obtain detailed spectra of different vowel sounds, measure relative amplitudes of harmonics in the recorded sounds, and perform additive synthesis using Mathematica to recreate the different vowels. Students can investigate the minimum number of harmonics and formants needed to distinguish vowels. A new version of this activity relies on a recently developed interactive audio synthesis program that reduces the emphasis on tedious measurements and the need to edit Mathematica notebooks, allowing students to devote intellectual effort on investigation. The new program and the associated lab activity will be tested on students during Fall quarter of 2013 as part of the “Physics of Musical Sound” course at Central Washington University.

Perception of Musical Timbre by Cochlear Implant Listeners

Several studies have shown that the ability to identify the timbre of musical instruments is reduced in cochlear implant (CI) users compared with normal-hearing (NH) listeners. However, most of these studies have focused on tasks that require specific musical knowledge. In contrast, the present study investigates the perception of timbre by CI subjects using a multidimensional scaling (MDS) paradigm. The main objective was to investigate whether CI subjects use the same cues as NH listeners do to differentiate the timbre of musical instruments. Three groups of 10 NH subjects and one group of 10 CI subjects were asked to make dissimilarity judgments between pairs of instrumental sounds. The stimuli were 16 synthetic instrument tones spanning a wide range of instrument families. All sounds had the same fundamental frequency (261 Hz) and were balanced in loudness and in perceived duration before the experiment. One group of NH subjects listened to unprocessed stimuli. The other two groups of NH subjects listened to the same stimuli passed through a four-channel or an eight-channel noise vocoder, designed to simulate the signal processing performed by a real CI. Subjects were presented with all possible combinations of pairs of instruments and had to estimate, for each pair, the amount of dissimilarity between the two sounds. These estimates were used to construct dissimilarity matrices, which were further analyzed using an MDS model. The model output gave, for each subject group, an optimal graphical representation of the perceptual distances between stimuli (the so-called "timbre space"). For all groups, the first two dimensions of the timbre space were strikingly similar and correlated strongly with the logarithm of the attack time and with the center of gravity of the spectral envelope, respectively. The acoustic correlate of the third dimension differed across groups but only accounted for a small proportion of the variance explained by the MDS solution. Surprisingly, CI subjects and NH subjects listening to noise-vocoded simulations gave relatively more weight to the spectral envelope dimension and less weight to the attack-time dimension when making their judgments than NH subjects listening to unprocessed stimuli. One possible reason for the relatively higher salience of spectral envelope cues in real and simulated CIs may be that the degradation of local fine spectral details produced a more stable spectral envelope across the stimulus duration. The internal representation of musical timbre for isolated musical instrument sounds was found to be similar in NH and in CI listeners. This suggests that training procedures designed to improve timbre recognition in CIs will indeed train CI subjects to use the same cues as NH listeners. Furthermore, NH subjects listening to noise-vocoded sounds appear to be a good model of CI timbre perception as they show the same first two perceptual dimensions as CI subjects do and also exhibit a similar change in perceptual weights applied to these two dimensions. This last finding validates the use of simulations to evaluate and compare training procedures to improve timbre perception in CIs.