The Timbre Perception Test (TPT): A new interactive musical assessment tool to measure timbre perception ability.

ABSTRACT: To date, tests that measure individual differences in the ability to perceive musical timbre are scarce in the published literature. The lack of such tool limits research on how timbre, a primary attribute of sound, is perceived and processed among individuals. The current paper describes the development of the Timbre Perception Test (TPT), in which participants use a slider to reproduce heard auditory stimuli that vary along three important dimensions of timbre: envelope, spectral flux, and spectral centroid. With a sample of 95 participants, the TPT was calibrated and validated against measures of related abilities and examined for its reliability. The results indicate that a short-version (8 minutes) of the TPT has good explanatory support from a factor analysis model, acceptable internal reliability (? = .69, ?t = .70), good test-retest reliability (r = .79) and substantial correlations with self-reported general musical sophistication (? = .63) and pitch discrimination (? = .56), as well as somewhat lower correlations with duration discrimination (? = .27), and musical instrument discrimination abilities (? = .33). Overall, the TPT represents a robust tool to measure an individual's timbre perception ability. Furthermore, the use of sliders to perform a reproductive task has shown to be an effective approach in threshold testing. The current version of the TPT is openly available for research purposes.

SUBMITTER: Lee H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7536169 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature