ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Statistical and Perceptual Audition (SAPA2006) Pittsburgh, PA, USA September 16, 2006

A Statistical Model of Timbre Perception

Hiroko Terasawa (1), Malcolm Slaney (1,2), Jonathan Berger (1)

(1) CCRMA, Department of Music, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA
(2) Yahoo! Research, Sunnyvale, CA, USA

We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two timbre representations and measure perceptual judgments on an equivalent range of timbre variety. We determine that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) is a good model for a perceptual timbre space.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Terasawa, Hiroko / Slaney, Malcolm / Berger, Jonathan (2006): "A statistical model of timbre perception", In SAPA-2006, 18-23.