Subject: Re: [AUDITORY] Shortest duration to perceive timbre or tonal quality? Suggest reference From: "James W. Beauchamp" <jwbeauch@xxxxxxxx> Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2018 17:07:00 -0500 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>Dear Jiajun, There have been numerous clues that attack transients of musical instrument tones are important, but there's not been a lot of hard evidence. The 1963 paper by Clark, et al.: "Preliminary Experiments on the Aural Significance of Parts of Tones of Orchesteral Instruments and on Choral Tones", J Audio Eng Soc, Vol 11, no. 1, pp 45-54 (1963) gives confusions matrices for 13 sustain tone instruments for normal tones, first 0.15 s of tones, first 0.06 s of tones, and 0.60 s of their "steady states". These matrices showed that "identification of nonpercussive orchestral instruments from the first 0.15 sec of their tones is not much worse than from the normal tone". It was "very striking that the identifications (were) so very resistent to shortening the duration of the note". It would be good to see more evidence about the importance of transients for identification. I suspect that much shorter transients could be identified for percussive instruments. E.g., piano vs. guitar vs. koto. Jim Beauchamp University of Illinois Original message: > From: Jiajun Yang <thejyang@xxxxxxxx> > Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2018 11:24:33 +0100 > To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxx > Subject: Shortest duration to perceive timbre or tonal quality? Suggest reference > > Dear colleagues, > > I am hoping if you can point us to some studies on whether there is a > minimum duration of sound for its timbre or tonal quality to be clearly > perceived. > > I found this quote from > http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/acoustics/chapter1_timbre.shtml > <http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/acoustics/chapter1_timbre.shtml> > that "Some studies have indicated it takes at least 60ms to recognise > the timbre of a sound" However, I am not about to locate the exact study. > > Many thanks > > Jiajun Yang > Postdoc research, Ambient Intelligence Group, > Citec, Bielefeld University, Germany=