The Timbre Model

This paper presents the timbre model, a signal model which has been built to better understand the relationship between the perception of timbre and the musical sounds most commonly associated with timbre. In addition, an extension to the timbre model incorporating expressions is introduced. The presented work therefore has relation to a large field of science, including auditory perception, signal processing, physical models and the acoustics of musical instruments, music expression, and other computer music research. The timbre model is based on a sinusoidal model, and it consists of a spectral envelope, frequencies, a temporal envelope and different irregularity parameters. The paper is divided into four parts: an overview of the research done on the perception of timbre, an overview of the signal processing aspects dealing with sinusoidal modeling, the timbre model, and an introduction of some expressive extensions to the timbre model