TY  - GEN
TI  - Neuromagnetic representation of musical timbre dimensions in human auditory cortex
Y1  - 2025///
N2  - The present work investigates the neuromagnetic representation of musical timbre dimensions in the human auditory cortex and aims at improving the understanding
of timbre processing and perception. To this, neuromagnetic and psychoacoustic data were collected in a magnetoencephalography experiment and a psychoacoustic
experiment, and the obtained data were set in relation to physical sound properties. Using magnetoencephalography, the subjects? neuromagnetic responses to melodies with changes in pitch contour/instrument register/instrument family/sound location, as well as neuromagnetic responses to melodies differing in attack time, were registered in order to investigate the neuromagnetic processing and representation
of three established timbre dimensions (pitch, brightness and attack time). The melodies consisted of oboe, clarinet, bassoon and bass clarinet notes, which were judged regarding their relative brightness in the psychoacoustic experiment. Results show that contour changes largely influence the neuromagnetic P2 response to the fifth tone of the melody, and register changes mainly affect the neuromagnetic N1 and P2 responses to the fourth tone of the melody; by contrast, changes in pitch contour, instrument family and changes in sound location do not have a major influence on the N1 and P2 responses to the fourth tone of the melody. This suggests that register changes are more salient than pitch contour, instrument family and sound location changes. Standardised attack times evoked significantly larger onset-N1 and onset-P2 responses than natural attack times, which implies that standardised attack times contain less instrument-specific information such that the auditory cortex rather uses spectral than temporal sound features for instrument identification. Results further indicate that the right auditory cortex is more involved in early timbre processing, whereas the left auditory cortex is more implicated in later timbre processing. The perceived brightness of the instrumental tones was found to depend more on pitch and instrument register than on instrument family. This observation highlights that pitch and register have a stronger effect on timbre perception than instrument family. Temporal sound features are mainly reflected in the N1 response, whereas spectral sound features are largely
mirrored in the P2 response. Timbre perception depends more on temporal sound attributes and N1/P2 latencies than on spectral sound attributes and N1/P2 amplitudes. Beyond that, timbre processing ? but not timbre perception ? is influenced by the subjects? musical aptitude and pitch perception preference.
CY  - Heidelberg
AV  - public
A1  - Günther, Melanie
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/35998/
ID  - heidok35998
ER  -