Multidimensional Scaling of Synthetic Musical Timbre: Perception of Spectral and Temporal Characteristics

Abstract The perceptual correlates of acoustic parameters involved in musical timbre were investigated by examining judgements of timbre dissimilarity. Nine synthetic sounds were created, derived from crossing three levels of spectral and temporal parameters (number of harmonics and rise time, respectively). Two separate conditions were tested, one using single tones, the other using short melodies. Fifteen musically untrained subjects were presented with pairs of stimuli and asked to judge dissimilarity on an 8-point scale. The spatial configuration resulting from multi-dimensional analysis of the data was best fit by a three-dimensional model, with the first two dimensions ac-counting for most of the variance. The perceptual space derived from the analysis indicates that these two orthogo-nal dimensions corresponded closely to the spectral an