Effect of phase on the timbre of complex tones.

Applying a digital computer both for signal generation and response processing, some experiments were carried out in which comparisons were made of the timbres of complex tones. The tones had equal loudness and pitch but different phase and amplitude patterns of the harmonics. The stimuli were presented successively in triads, and the subject's task was to select the most similar and most dissimilar pairs. The results were analyzed with Kruskal's multidimensional‐scaling program. In general terms, the most important findings are: (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/oct 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 patt...

[1]  H. Helmholtz,et al.  Ueber die Klangfarbe der Vocale , 1859 .

[2]  Zur Frage betreffend den Einfluss der Phasen auf die Klangfarbe , 1896 .

[3]  Über den Einfluß der Phasen auf die Klangfarbe , 1903 .

[4]  Harvey Fletcher,et al.  Loudness, Pitch and the Timbre of Musical Tones and Their Relation to the Intensity, the Frequency and the Overtone Structure , 1934 .

[5]  An Investigation of Subjective Tones by Means of the Steady Tone Phase Effect , 1937 .

[6]  S. Siegel,et al.  Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences , 2022, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[7]  J. C. R. Licklider.  Effects of Changes in the Phase Pattern upon the Sound of a 16‐Harmonic Tone , 1957 .

[8]  Joseph L. Zinnes,et al.  Theory and Methods of Scaling. , 1958 .

[9]  Manfred R. Schroeder.  New Results Concerning Monaural Phase Sensitivity , 1959 .

[10]  Lloyd A. Jeffress,et al.  Effect of Phase on the Quality of a Two‐Component Tone , 1962 .

[11]  J. Kruskal.  Nonmetric multidimensional scaling: A numerical method , 1964 .

[12]  J. Kruskal.  Multidimensional scaling by optimizing goodness of fit to a nonmetric hypothesis , 1964 .

[13]  R Plomp,et al.  Beats of mistuned consonances. , 1967, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  J. L. Goldstein.  Auditory spectral filtering and monaural phase perception. , 1967, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  R. Plomp,et al.  Perceptual and physical space of vowel sounds. , 1969, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.