Perception of musical timbre by cochlear-implant listeners
Résumé
Improving the perception of music by cochlear implant (CI) listeners remains one of the biggest challenge in this research field. The present study aims to better understand how CI users perceive musical timbre. Three groups of 10 normally-hearing (NH) listeners and one group of 10 CI users were asked to make dissimilarity judgments between pairs of instrumental sounds. The stimuli were 16 synthetic tones spanning a wide range of instrument families. All sounds had the same fundamental frequency (261 Hz) and were balanced in loudness and in duration. One group of NH listeners listened to unprocessed stimuli while the other two NH groups listened to noise-vocoded CI simulations (with 4 and 8 spectral analysis/synthesis channels, respectively). The dissimilarity judgments were analysed using multidimensional scaling. We found that (1) for all groups, the first two dimensions of the timbre space were strikingly similar and correlated with the log of the attack time and with the spectral centroid, respectively, (2) NH subjects listening to unprocessed sounds gave relatively more weight to the attack time and less weight to the spectral centroid than the other three groups of subjects, (3) Noise-vocoded simulations appear to be a good model of timbre perception by CI subjects.
Domaines
Acoustique [physics.class-ph]
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