Abstract
Timbre has been an important concept for scientific exploration of music at least since the time of Helmholtz ([1877] 1954). Since Helmholtz’s time, a number of studies have defined and investigated acoustical features of musical instrument tones to determine their perceptual importance, or salience (e.g., Grey, 1975, 1977; Kendall, 1986; Kendall et al., 1999; Luce and Clark, 1965; McAdams et al., 1995, 1999; Saldanha and Corso, 1964; Wedin and Goude, 1972). Most of these studies have considered only nonpercussive, or continuant, tones of Western orchestral instruments (or emulations thereof). In the past few years, advances in computing power and programming have made possible and affordable the definition and control of new acoustical variables. This chapter gives an overview of past and current research, with a special emphasis on the time-variant aspects of musical timbre. According to common observation, “music is made of tones in time” (Spaeth, 1933). We will also consider the fact that music is made of “time in tones.”
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HAJDA, J.M. (2007). The Effect of Dynamic Acoustical Features on Musical Timbre. In: Beauchamp, J.W. (eds) Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds. Modern Acoustics and Signal Processing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-32576-7_7
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