Re: effects of musical experience on pitch perception?

["Richard F. Lyon" <DickLyon@xxxxxxx>]

At 4:33 PM -0400 7/15/06, Fred Herzfeld wrote:
> ...The piano, the violin and drums all have different timbers and 
> these can depend on:
>
> (a) the number of harmonics
> (b) the phase of each harmonic relative to a specific harmonic
> (c) the intensity of each of the harmonics.
>
> It is thus obvious that timber must be measured along at least the 
> three dimensions I gave above.

Fred, I think you're mixing metaphors here; mixing signal types 
anyway.  There's a big difference between an actual instrument note 
and a "composite tone", a periodic waveform that can be described by 
a Fourier series.  It is well documented that a large part of an 
instrument's character, which I believe falls under the term 
'timbre', comes from the attack transients.

One could say therefore that there are other important dimensions, 
consistent with your "at least" statement.  But I would still argue 
that it is misleading to say the that timbre "must be measured" along 
those dimensions from Fourier analysis, since many sounds that have a 
timbre do not have any sensible decomposition into harmonics; 
percussion especially.

Still, your approach should be fine for "composite tones" that are periodic.

Dick