Roughly defined as any property other than pitch, duration, and loudness that allows two sounds to be distinguished, timbre is a foundational aspect of hearing. The remarkable ability of humans to recognize sound sources and events (e.g., glass breaking, a friend's voice, a tone from a piano) stems primarily from a capacity to perceive and process differences in the timbre of sounds. Timbre raises many important issues in psychology and the cognitive sciences, musical acoustics, speech processing, medical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Current research on timbre perception unfolds along three main fronts: On the one hand, researchers explore the principal perceptual processes that orchestrate timbre processing, such as the structure of its perceptual representation, sound categorization and recognition, memory for timbre, and its ability to elicit rich semantic associations, as well as the underlying neural mechanisms. On the other hand, timbre is studied as part of specific scenarios, including the perception of the human voice, as a structuring force in music, as perceived with cochlear implants, and through its role in affecting sound quality and sound design. Finally, computational acoustic models are sought through prediction of psychophysical data, physiologically inspired representations, and audio analysis-synthesis techniques. Along these three scientific fronts, significant breakthroughs have been achieved during the last decade.
This volume will be the first book dedicated to a comprehensive and authoritative presentation of timbre perception and cognition research and the acoustic modeling of timbre. The volume will serve as a natural complement to the SHAR volumes on the basic auditory parameters of Pitch edited by Plack, Oxenham, Popper, and Fay, and Loudness by Florentine, Popper, and Fay. Moreover, through the integration of complementary scientific methods ranging from signal processing to brain imaging, the book has the potential to leverage new interdisciplinary synergies in hearing science. For these reasons, the volume will be exceptionally valuable to various subfields of hearing science, including cognitive auditory neuroscience, psychoacoustics, music perception and cognition, but may even exert significant influence on fields such as musical acoustics, music information retrieval, and acoustic signal processing.

It is expected that the volume will have broad appeal to psychologists, neuroscientists, and acousticians involved in research on auditory perception and cognition. Specifically, this book will have a strong impact on hearing researchers with interest in timbre and will serve as the key publication and up-to-date reference on timbre for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, as well as established scholars.

Dr. Kai Siedenburg is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Independent Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany.
Dr. Charalampos Saitis is Humboldt Research Fellow in the Audio Communication Group at the Technical University of Berlin. Drs. Saitis and Siedenburg have published papers on musical sound quality and timbre, respectively. They conceived and co-organized the 2017 Berlin Interdisciplinary Workshop on Timbre.
Dr. Stephen McAdams is Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition and professor in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Montreal. Dr. McAdams is an internationally recognized expert on the perception and cognition of timbre.

The Present, Past, and Future of Timbre Research Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, and Stephen McAdams The Perceptual Representation of Timbre Stephen McAdams Timbre Recognition and Sound Source Identification Trevor R. Agus, Clara Suied, and Daniel Pressnitzer Memory for Timbre Kai Siedenburg and Daniel Müllensiefen The Semantics of Timbre Charalampos Saitis and Stefan Weinzierl Neural Correlates of Timbre Processing Vinoo Alluri and Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri Voice Processing and Voice-Identity Recognition Samuel Robert Mathias and Katharina von Kriegstein Timbre as a Structuring Force in Music Stephen McAdams Timbre, Sound Quality, and Sound Design Guillaume Lemaitre and Patrick Susini Timbre Perception with Cochlear Implants Jeremy Marozeau and Wiebke LampingAudio ContentDescriptors of Timbre Marcelo Caetano, Charalampos Saitis, and Kai Siedenburg Modulation Representations for Speech and Music Mounya Elhilali Timbre from Sound Synthesis and High-level Control Perspectives Sølvi Ystad, Mitsuko Aramaki, and Richard Kronland-Martinet Kai Siedenburg is Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany Charalampos Saitis is Lecturer and Humboldt Research Fellow in the Audio Communication Group at Technische Universität Berlin, Germany Stephen McAdams is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition in the Department of Music Research at McGill University, Montreal, Canada Arthur N. Popper is Professor Emeritus and research professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland, College Park Richard R. Fay is Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at Loyola University, Chicago

Autorentext
Dr. Kai Siedenburg is Marie Skodowska-Curie Independent Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Medical Physics and Acoustics at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. 
Dr. Charalampos Saitis is Humboldt Research Fellow in the Audio Communication Group at the Technical University of Berlin. Drs. Saitis and Siedenburg have published papers on musical sound quality and timbre, respectively. They conceived and co-organized the 2017 Berlin Interdisciplinary Workshop on Timbre. 
Dr. Stephen McAdams is Canada Research Chair in Music Perception and Cognition and professor in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Montreal. Dr. McAdams is an internationally recognized expert on the perception and cognition of timbre. 

Inhalt
1. Current Developments in Timbre Research     Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis, Stephen McAdams

            The goal of this chapter is to provide a roadmap and context for the whole volume. Hence, the chapter will provide a conceptual introduction to the notion of timbre and a brief survey of important steps in the history of timbre research. The content of the subsequent chapters will be briefly outlined and situated in an interdisciplinary framework, followed by a discussion of important research questions on timbre.

PART I: PRINCIPAL PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES

2. The Perceptual Representation of Timbre****

    Stephen McAdams

This chapter covers the current state of knowledge about the structure of timbre's perceptual representation. It discusses dimensional models of timbre based on multidimensional scaling (MDS) of timbre dissimilarity ratings and addresses various extensions of MDS models as well as psychophysical explanations in terms of acoustical correlates of perceptual dimensions. It further covers research on the covariance of timbre, pitch, and loudness and discusses the ways in which this covariance affects the recognition and identification of sound sources.  It further outlines the utility of considering high-dimensional acoustic representations such as modulation spectra as an acoustic basis for timbre modeling.

3. Timbre Categorization and Recognition

    Trevor Agus, Clara Suied, Daniel Pressnitzer**

There have been many important and intriguing empirical findings on the categorization and recognition of sounds in the last seven years. This chapter reviews these studies and specifically examines the minimal amount of acoustic and tempo…