Conferência Internacional IC CIPEM 2019

19 - 21 Setembro

Timbre Perception in children from Primary

School (8 - 12)
Pablo Puentes, Imma Ponsatí

1. Research Questions
How many timbre dimensions do children perceive when listening to musical instruments?
Is there a correlation between these dimensions and the audio features of those sounds?
Are the results with children (8-12) similar to the results obtained with adults?

2. Reference Framework
Timbre perception is a recent field of study in music perception and music education. One of the
most popular techniques used in the studies is the multidimensional scaling analysis (MDS), which
gets the dissimilarity ratings on pairs of music instruments and retrieves the perceptual dimensions
in timbre. These dimensions can later be correlated to acoustic features from the audio signal
(Plomp, 1970; Wessel, 1973; Grey, 1977; Krumhansl, 1989; McAdams et al., 1995).

3. Method
14 children aged 8-12 listened to five acoustic instruments grouped in random pairs (n=25). All the
instruments played the same pitch (Eb4 = 311Hz), with equal perceived amplitude and duration. The
children had to rate from 1 to 4 how similar the couples were, being 1 very similar and 4 very
different. The data analysis was performed with a MDS algorithm and a
library for audio analysis called Essentia (Bogdanov, 2013).

4. Results
The MDS classical algorithm gave us a 2 dimension solution as the optimal
solution. In Fig.1, the couples of sounds placed on the right side of the space
(dim 1) were rated very similar whereas the ones on the left were rated very
different. In the audio analysis, these differences are correlated to the log
attack time - the descriptor that represents how fast the attack of the sound
is. We haven’t found correlations between children’s perception and the
spectral centroid (brightness) as other researchers did in studies with adults.

5.Conclusion
There are two dimensions that explain children’s timbre perception (8-12).
Dimension 1 is correlated to the log attack time of the envelope of the
sound. However, spectral centroid and spectral flux don’t seem to have a
clear correlation with any dimension.This could mean that children pay more
attention to the attack time than adults do and that children don’t use as much
spectral information as adults do when distinguishing timbres.