1Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre 2University of Tartu and Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre

Abstract. This article deals with timbre-induced pitch deviations and their magnitude in environments designed to resemble those that performing musicians encounter in their daily practice. Two experiments were con-ducted. In the first experiment classically trained singers matched the pitch of synthe-sized sounds of the piano and oboe. The fun-damental frequency of vocal sounds was on average 7 to 13 cents lower than the funda-mental frequency of the instrumental sounds. The difference was more pronounced in the case of the piano timbre. In the second ex-periment, participants compared sounds pro-duced by a single performer from the pitch-matching task of the first experiment to syn-thesized piano and oboe sounds. A three-alter-native forced choice task was used, where participants judged whether the instrumental sounds were higher, lower or equal in pitch when compared to the vocal sounds. Results showed that the highest number of in-tune ratings was elicited if the vocal sounds were performed at about 20 cents below the funda-mental frequency of the instrumental sounds. The difference between fundamental frequen-cies of the sounds perceived as equal in pitch may be explained by different energy distribu-tions in their power spectra