Re: About importance of "phase" in sound recognition ("James W. Beauchamp" )


Subject: Re: About importance of "phase" in sound recognition
From:    "James W. Beauchamp"  <jwbeauch@xxxxxxxx>
Date:    Thu, 7 Oct 2010 12:06:14 -0500
List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>

The subject title says "recognition", which is a lot different than "discrimination", but I don't get the sense that recognition is all that people are talking about on this thread. To me, the definitive paper on phase discrimination on steady-state complex tones was by Plomp and Sieeneken in 1969: R. Plomp and H. J. M. Sieeneken, "Effect of phase on timbre of complex tones", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 46, No. 2 (pt.2), 409-421 (1969). The prototype signal was a sawtooth but with only 10 harmonics in the Fourier series. Phase angles on the harmonics were random multiples of pi/16. The conclusions were: (1) The timbre difference between a tone consisting of only sine or cosine terms and a tone consisting of alternative sine and cosine terms represents the maximal possible effect of phase on timbre; (2) the maximal effect of phase on timbre is quantitatively smaller than the effect of changing the slope of the amplitude pattern by 2 dB/pct and is less for higher than for lower frequencies; (3) the effect of phase on timbre appears to be independent of the effect of amplitude pattern and of the loudness factor. There have been a lot of papers about the importance of phase in musical contexts. Here are a couple: T. H. Andersen and K. Jensen, "Importance and representation of phase in the sinusoidal model" J. Audio Engr. Soc. 52, No. 11, 1157-1169 (2004) S. Dubnov and X. Rodet, "Investigatioi of phase coupling phenomena in sustained portion of musical isntruments sounds", J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113, No. 1, 348-359 (2003). Jim Beauchamp Univ. of Illinois


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