Rearrangement of Timbre Space Due To Background Noise: Behavioural Evidence and Acoustic Correlates

Studies of timbre are usually conducted in a "vacuum" of perfect silence. However, in the real-world, sounds are mostly heard in the presence of competing background noise. A series of pairwise dissimilarity listening tests on musically trained participants demonstrated how different levels of background noise can cause rearrangement of timbre spaces. Furthermore, it was shown that while spectral acoustic descriptors (e.g. spectral centroid or tristimulus values) seem robust under the presence of background noise, descriptors representing deviations from purely harmonic characteristics (e.g. inharmonicity) lose their salience for the higher noise level. Such results suggest that studies of timbre may need to take background noise into account in order to enhance their validity for real world applications.