<p>For a general discussion of neural correlates of music perception, check out the review by Koelsch et al (2005).</p>

<p>Menon et al (2002) provide a starting point for learning about neural correlates of timbre processing. I quote the abstract. But have a look at the article for more info</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Timbre is a major structuring force in music and one of the most
  important and ecologically relevant features of auditory events. We
  used sound stimuli selected on the basis of previous
  psychophysiological studies to investigate the neural correlates of
  timbre perception. Our results indicate that both the <strong>left and right
  hemispheres are involved in timbre processing</strong>, challenging the
  conventional notion that the elementary attributes of musical
  perception are predominantly lateralized to the right hemisphere.
  <strong>Signiﬁcant timbre-related brain activation was found in well-de- ﬁned
  regions of posterior Heschl’s gyrus and superior temporal sulcus,
  extending into the circular insular sulcus</strong>. Although the extent of
  activation was not signiﬁcantly different between left and right
  hemispheres, temporal lobe activations were signiﬁcantly posterior in
  the left, compared to the right, hemisphere, suggesting a functional
  asymmetry in their respective contributions to timbre processing. The
  implications of our ﬁndings for music processing in particular and
  auditory processing in general are discussed.</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Halpern et al (2004) provide another relevant study:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>The generality of findings implicating secondary auditory areas in
  auditory imagery was tested by using a timbre imagery task with fMRI.
  Another aim was to test whether activity in supplementary motor area
  (SMA) seen in prior studies might have been related to
  subvocalization. Participants with moderate musical background were
  scanned while making similarity judgments about the timbre of heard or
  imagined musical instrument sounds. The critical control condition was
  a visual imagery task. The pattern of judgments in perceived and
  imagined conditions was similar, suggesting that perception and
  imagery access similar cognitive representations of timbre. As
  expected, judgments of heard timbres, relative to the visual imagery
  control, activated primary and secondary auditory areas with some
  right-sided asymmetry. Timbre imagery also activated secondary
  auditory areas relative to the visual imagery control, although less
  strongly, in accord with previous data. Significant overlap was
  observed in these regions between perceptual and imagery conditions.
  Because the visual control task resulted in deactivation of auditory
  areas relative to a silent baseline, we interpret the timbre imagery
  effect as a reversal of that deactivation. Despite the lack of an
  obvious subvocalization component to timbre imagery, some activity in
  SMA was observed, suggesting that SMA may have a more general role in
  imagery beyond any motor component.</p>
</blockquote>

<h3>References</h3>

<ul>
<li>Menon, V., Levitin, D. J., Smith, B. K., Lembke, A., Krasnow, B. D., Glazer, D., ... &amp; McAdams, S. (2002). Neural correlates of timbre change in harmonic sounds. Neuroimage, 17(4), 1742-1754. <a href="http://spin.ecn.purdue.edu/fmri/PDFLibrary/MenonV_NI_2002_17_1742_1754.pdf" rel="nofollow">PDF</a></li>
<li>Halpern, A. R., Zatorre, R. J., Bouffard, M., &amp; Johnson, J. A. (2004). Behavioral and neural correlates of perceived and imagined musical timbre. Neuropsychologia, 42(9), 1281-1292. <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.198.9746&amp;rep=rep1&amp;type=pdf" rel="nofollow">PDF</a></li>
<li>Koelsch, S., &amp; Siebel, W. A. (2005). Towards a neural basis of music perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 9(12), 578-584. Koelsch, S., &amp; Siebel, W. A. (2005). Towards a neural basis of music perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 9(12), 578-584. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114071/" rel="nofollow">HTML</a></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-08T01:17:05.593Z
2013-02-08T01:17:05.593Z
Jeromy Anglim
<p>Are there any studies concerning the psychological aspects of timbre processing in the brain, e.g. while listening to music? In particular, can any lower-level correlates be discerned when trying to answer questions like:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>what makes particular timbres more pleasing than others? (e.g. a trumpet vs pure sine wave)</p></li>
<li><p>what accounts for different preferences between people? (e.g. preference for piano sound over trumpet)</p></li>
</ul>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T00:26:04.007Z
I think this is a great question (I'm a "lower-level correlates" fan, myself), but I think it's going to be hard to take something highly abstract like taste preferences ("Do I like that?" can be a decision based on a very large and multimodal feature space) and map them to neurophysiological processes, like we could for tonal processing and the like.
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T00:27:12.993Z
(someone is perfectly welcome to prove me wrong on that)
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T01:43:56.780Z
I Mostly agree with Chuck.  But I think the physics of the timbre are important to decomposing timbre so that we can talk about what different characteristics create what different effects.  The major characteristics of timbre are: attack, decay, and sustain.  They basically describe the shape of the envelope.  Also important are the harmonics of the instrument (for instance, on a violin, the strings themselves have harmonics but the body of the violin also resonates).  I think part of the richness of the violin as how intense the timbre is.  The strings are constantly being perturbed.
Keegan Keplinger
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T04:44:35.417Z
@Xurtio Sure, that would certainly be true if you could extract which physical features make those notes unique and examine them objectively, recognizing that the quantity "timbre" (e.g.,note on a piano vs. note on a violin, as the Wiki example cites)  itself is likely measurable.  The higher-level "judgement" of that complex quantity is likely still too abstract, though.
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T20:12:24.557Z
I think you probably could to some extent.  If you have people judge the quality of several timbres and see if there is a particular trend for timbres with sharper attacks for instance.
Keegan Keplinger
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-02T20:17:43.080Z
For judgments, you could have one group rate some fixed set of qualities fir each timbre and have another group answer in their own words in a paragraph, then perform quantitative phenomenology analysis.   The second group would help avoid a priming bias.
Keegan Keplinger
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-03T23:34:48.343Z
@Xurtio It's indisputable that it could be studied.  I'm just concerned with trying to establish lower-level correlates of "I like tubas because they remind me of the time I played in marching band on a cold day during the state football championships" would be difficult (so in terms of his second bullet point).
Chuck Sherrington
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-02-03T23:47:41.010Z
Ah yeah, I agree.  Too much emergent complexity involved with the second bullet point which means lots of degeneracy
Keegan Keplinger
<perception><music><hearing>
Psychology of timbre processing
Marcin Kotowski
# Psychology of timbre processing

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-02-01)

Are there any studies concerning the psychological aspects of timbre processing in the brain, e.g. while listening to music? In particular, can any lower-level correlates be discerned when trying to answer questions like:

* what makes particular timbres more pleasing than others? (e.g. a trumpet vs pure sine wave)
* what accounts for different preferences between people? (e.g. preference for piano sound over trumpet)

**Tags:** perception, music, hearing

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: I think this is a great question (I'm a "lower-level correlates" fan, myself), but I think it's going to be hard to take something highly abstract like taste preferences ("Do I like that?" can be a decision based on a very large and multimodal feature space) and map them to neurophysiological processes, like we could for tonal processing and the like.  
> **username_1**: (someone is perfectly welcome to prove me wrong on that)  
> **username_2**: I Mostly agree with Chuck.  But I think the physics of the timbre are important to decomposing timbre so that we can talk about what different characteristics create what different effects.  The major characteristics of timbre are: attack, decay, and sustain.  They basically describe the shape of the envelope.  Also important are the harmonics of the instrument (for instance, on a violin, the strings themselves have harmonics but the body of the violin also resonates).  I think part of the richness of the violin as how intense the timbre is.  The strings are constantly being perturbed.  
> **username_1**: @Xurtio Sure, that would certainly be true if you could extract which physical features make those notes unique and examine them objectively, recognizing that the quantity "timbre" (e.g.,note on a piano vs. note on a violin, as the Wiki example cites)  itself is likely measurable.  The higher-level "judgement" of that complex quantity is likely still too abstract, though.  
> **username_2**: I think you probably could to some extent.  If you have people judge the quality of several timbres and see if there is a particular trend for timbres with sharper attacks for instance.  
> **username_2**: For judgments, you could have one group rate some fixed set of qualities fir each timbre and have another group answer in their own words in a paragraph, then perform quantitative phenomenology analysis.   The second group would help avoid a priming bias.  
> **username_1**: @Xurtio It's indisputable that it could be studied.  I'm just concerned with trying to establish lower-level correlates of "I like tubas because they remind me of the time I played in marching band on a cold day during the state football championships" would be difficult (so in terms of his second bullet point).  
> **username_2**: Ah yeah, I agree.  Too much emergent complexity involved with the second bullet point which means lots of degeneracy  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_3 on 2013-02-08. Score: 3

For a general discussion of neural correlates of music perception, check out the review by Koelsch et al (2005).

Menon et al (2002) provide a starting point for learning about neural correlates of timbre processing. I quote the abstract. But have a look at the article for more info

> Timbre is a major structuring force in music and one of the most
> important and ecologically relevant features of auditory events. We
> used sound stimuli selected on the basis of previous
> psychophysiological studies to investigate the neural correlates of
> timbre perception. Our results indicate that both the **left and right
> hemispheres are involved in timbre processing**, challenging the
> conventional notion that the elementary attributes of musical
> perception are predominantly lateralized to the right hemisphere.
> **Signiﬁcant timbre-related brain activation was found in well-de- ﬁned
> regions of posterior Heschl’s gyrus and superior temporal sulcus,
> extending into the circular insular sulcus**. Although the extent of
> activation was not signiﬁcantly different between left and right
> hemispheres, temporal lobe activations were signiﬁcantly posterior in
> the left, compared to the right, hemisphere, suggesting a functional
> asymmetry in their respective contributions to timbre processing. The
> implications of our ﬁndings for music processing in particular and
> auditory processing in general are discussed.

Halpern et al (2004) provide another relevant study:

> The generality of findings implicating secondary auditory areas in
> auditory imagery was tested by using a timbre imagery task with fMRI.
> Another aim was to test whether activity in supplementary motor area
> (SMA) seen in prior studies might have been related to
> subvocalization. Participants with moderate musical background were
> scanned while making similarity judgments about the timbre of heard or
> imagined musical instrument sounds. The critical control condition was
> a visual imagery task. The pattern of judgments in perceived and
> imagined conditions was similar, suggesting that perception and
> imagery access similar cognitive representations of timbre. As
> expected, judgments of heard timbres, relative to the visual imagery
> control, activated primary and secondary auditory areas with some
> right-sided asymmetry. Timbre imagery also activated secondary
> auditory areas relative to the visual imagery control, although less
> strongly, in accord with previous data. Significant overlap was
> observed in these regions between perceptual and imagery conditions.
> Because the visual control task resulted in deactivation of auditory
> areas relative to a silent baseline, we interpret the timbre imagery
> effect as a reversal of that deactivation. Despite the lack of an
> obvious subvocalization component to timbre imagery, some activity in
> SMA was observed, suggesting that SMA may have a more general role in
> imagery beyond any motor component.

### References

* Menon, V., Levitin, D. J., Smith, B. K., Lembke, A., Krasnow, B. D., Glazer, D., ... & McAdams, S. (2002). Neural correlates of timbre change in harmonic sounds. Neuroimage, 17(4), 1742-1754. [PDF](http://spin.ecn.purdue.edu/fmri/PDFLibrary/MenonV_NI_2002_17_1742_1754.pdf)
* Halpern, A. R., Zatorre, R. J., Bouffard, M., & Johnson, J. A. (2004). Behavioral and neural correlates of perceived and imagined musical timbre. Neuropsychologia, 42(9), 1281-1292. [PDF](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.198.9746&rep=rep1&type=pdf)
* Koelsch, S., & Siebel, W. A. (2005). Towards a neural basis of music perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 9(12), 578-584. Koelsch, S., & Siebel, W. A. (2005). Towards a neural basis of music perception. Trends in cognitive sciences, 9(12), 578-584. [HTML](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3114071/)


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