The perception of timbre of steady‐state complex tones

The paper will present a review of work by the author in timbre perception. Steady‐state complex tones are characterized by three perceptual attributes: loudness, pitch, and timbre. Loudness and pitch are mainly determined by a single physical parameter: loudness by intensity and pitch by the fundamental frequency. Timbre, on the contrary, is not a one‐dimensional attribute: It is primarily determined by the shape of the sound spectrum and, therefore, multidimensional. This aspect of tone sensation was investigated by means of multidimensional scaling. For tones derived from musical instruments, excellent agreement between three‐dimensional timbre representations and three‐dimensional spectrum representations was found. The most important dimension is the slope of the spectrum: tones with strong low harmonics sound dull, tones with strong high harmonics sound sharp. Local peaks in the spectrum result in specific timbres as in speech vowels. It was found that the phase relation among the harmonics has only...