Music in Our Ears: The Biological Bases of Musical Timbre Perception
Figure 6
Human listener's judgment of musical timbre similarity.
(A) The mean (top row) and standard deviation (bottom row) of the listeners' responses show the similarity between every pair of instruments for three notes A3, D4 and G#4. Red (values close to 1) indicates high dissimilarity and blue (values close to 0) indicates similarity. (B) Timbre similarity is averaged across subjects, musical notes and upper and lower half-matrices, and used for validation of the physiological and computational model. (C) Multidimensional scaling (MDS) applied to the human similarity matrix projected over 2 dimensions (shown to correlate with attack time and spectral centroid).