The goal of the current study was to explore outstanding questions in the field of timbre perception and cognition—specifically, whether memory for timbre is better in trained musicians or in nonmusicians, whether short-term timbre recognition is invariant to pitch differences, and whether timbre dissimilarity influences timbre recognition performance. Four experiments examined short-term recognition of musical timbre using a serial recognition task in which listeners indicated whether the orders of the timbres of two subsequently presented sound sequences were identical or not. Experiment 1 revealed significant effects of sequence length on recognition accuracy and an interaction of music training and pitch variability: musicians performed better for variable-pitch sequences, but did not differ from nonmusicians with constant-pitch sequences. Experiment 2 yielded a significant effect of pitch variability for musicians when pitch patterns varied between standard and comparison sequences. Experiment 3 high-lighted the impact of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds and indicated a recency effect in timbre recognition. Experiment 4 confirmed the importance of the dissimilarity of the swap, but did not yield any pertinent role of timbral heterogeneity of the sequence. Further analyses confirmed the strong correlation of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds with response behavior, accounting for around 90% of the variance in response choices across all four experiments. These results extend findings regarding the impact of music training and pitch variability from the literature on timbre perception to the domain of short-term memory and demonstrate the mnemonic importance of timbre similarity relations among sounds in sequences. The role of the factors of music training, pitch variability, and timbral similarity in music listening is discussed.

中文翻译：

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音色序列的短期识别

当前研究的目的是探索音色感知和认知领域的悬而未决的问题，特别是，对于受过训练的音乐家还是非音乐家，音色的记忆是否更好，短期音色的识别是否不变于音高差异，以及音色是否差异会影响音色识别性能。四个实验使用串行识别任务检查了音乐音色的短期识别，其中听众指出了两个随后呈现的声音序列的音色顺序是否相同。实验1揭示了音序长度对识别准确度以及音乐训练和音高变异性的相互作用的显着影响：音乐家在音高可变的音序上表现更好，但与音高恒定的非音乐家没有区别。当音高模式在标准和比较序列之间变化时，实验2对音乐人的音高可变性产生了显着影响。实验3突出显示了互换声音的音色差异的影响，并指出了音色识别中的新近度效果。实验4证实了交换的相似性的重要性，但没有产生序列音色异质性的任何相关作用。进一步的分析证实了交换声音的音色差异与响应行为之间的密切相关性，在所有四个实验中，响应选择差异约占90％。这些结果扩展了关于音乐训练和音高变化的影响的发现，从关于音色感知的文献到短期记忆的领域，并证明了序列中声音之间音色相似性关系的记忆意义。讨论了音乐训练，音高变化和音色相似性等因素在音乐聆听中的作用。