A sound’s onset transients largely determine instrument identity

Evidence

The onset of sound is also important in timbre perception. Sounds from many instruments have a distinctive onset, where the partials of the sound build up and possibly contain some transient-like, noisy components. The timbre during the onset defines the individual characteristics of the instrument in many cases. For example, some brass instrument sounds cannot be distinguished from each other if the onset is digitally removed. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1185

Categorization

• SEED: Strong essay angle: audio forensics and synthetic instrument design lean on onset cues — the whole field of tactile transducers and excitation vocoders exploits this.
• SHARE: Good for a sound designer friend: the fact that some brass instruments become indistinguishable when onset is removed is a classic psychoacoustics party fact.
• XREF: connects to: Grey’s timbre findings confirm that note onset transients largely determine perceived instrument identity — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1508