Timbre

pp. 329-379

in: Rolf Bader, Nonlinearities and synchronization in musical acoustics and music psychology, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

Timber is a multidimensional perceptional space and therefore much more difficult to understand compared to pitch perception (Licklider 1951). When subjects are asked to decide about similarities of sounds where pitch and timbre are altered, clearly the pitch change dominates the timbre change. So a hierarchy exists between these two. Still they are related in some way, and so to understand timbre perception it is appropriate to discuss pitch first.