Instrument Identification in Concurrent Unison Dyads: the Effect of Timbre Saliency

Saliency refers to the character of an object standing out, hence easily capturing someone’s attention. This concept, when applied to music, can be interpreted in a way that a highly salient instrument sound will more likely draw a listener’s attention than other concurrent instruments. That is, we might expect in turn that a highly salient instrument timbre will be more easily identified from other concurrent sounds, which will be also reflected by listeners’ higher confidence ratings. In order to test these hypotheses, an experiment was carried out where twenty-seven listeners heard concurrent unison dyads of different instruments and were asked to identify one instrument present. Presented with a list of possible instruments, listeners identified one instrument they heard in a stimulus and rated their confidence that the chosen instrument was present. The results proved not to be consistent with the hypothesis that listeners are better at identifying those instruments that exhibit greater timbre saliency (Chon, 2013). Possible explanations for this failure are discussed. Still, a mild yet statistically significant correlation was observed between the timbre saliency values and average confidence ratings, which is consistent with one of our hypotheses that listeners would be more confident of identifying more salient instrument sounds.