T he 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.

What determines the similarity of musical rhythms? According to the “family” theory, which this paper presents, one factor is the temporal sequence of the onsets of notes: rhythms with the same pattern of interonset intervals tend to sound similar. Another factor is meter. It determines whether or not rhythms are members of the same family, where families depend only on three types of possibility for each metrical unit. If the beat is the relevant metrical unit, these three possibilities are: 1) a note starts on a beat and therefore reinforces the meter, 2) a syncopation anticipates the beat and lasts through its onset and therefore disturbs the meter, and 3) all other events such as rests or ties that start on the beat provided no syncopation anticipates them. Two experiments showed that similarity between rhythms depends on both their temporal patterns of onsets and their families, which combined give a better account than edit distance – a metric of the distance apart of two strings of symbols. Two further experiments examined the errors that participants made in reproducing rhythms by tapping them. Errors more often yielded rhythms in the same family as the originals than rhythms in a different family.

WE INVESTIGATED THE CONTRIBUTION OF TONAL relationships to the perception of musical ideas and to the feelings of "arousal." Two excerpts of piano sonatas by Beethoven and two atonal variants were used as experimental stimuli. This manipulation destroyed the tonal relationships but preserved both the local and global temporal organization (rhythm and formal). Listeners were asked to indicate the onset of musical ideas, to estimate the arousing properties of the music in a continuous response task, and to rate the similarity of the pieces. A drastic change in the pitch structure strongly affected judgments of similarity. However, it had no effect on the segmentation of musical ideas, nor on the response of arousal. This finding emphasizes the importance of local and global levels of temporal structures on perceptual and emotional judgments, at the cost of the influence of tonal relationships.