A Comparison of Approaches to Timbre Descriptors in Music Information Retrieval and Music Psychology

A curious divide characterizes the usage of audio descriptors for timbre research in music information research (MIR) and music psychology. While MIR uses a multitude of audio descriptors for tasks such as automatic instrument classification, only a highly constrained set is used to describe the physical correlates of timbre perception in parts of music psychology. We argue that this gap is not coincidental and results from the differences in the two fields’ methodologies, their epistemic groundwork, and research goals. This paper lays out perspectives on the emergence of the divide and reviews studies in both fields with regards to divergences in research methods and goals. We discuss new representations for spectro-temporal modulations in MIR and psychology, and compare approaches to spectral envelope description in depth. Finally, we will propose that the interdisciplinary discourse on the computational modelling of music requires negotiations about the roles of scientific evaluation criteria.