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Phase alignment creates a 'buzzy' timbre perceptible without room reflections

Properties1
tagsja-picks, causal_relationships, singleton, xref

3 min read

Phase alignment creates a ‘buzzy’ timbre perceptible without room reflections

Evidence

The note onset phase is particularly important to perceived timbre. Since listeners can reliably perceive the timbre of notes during the steadystate phase, it is clear that the offset phase is rather less important to the perception of timbre than the onset and steady-state phases. The onset phase is also more acoustically robust from the effects of the local environ­ ment in which the notes are played, since coloration of the direct sound by the first reflection (see Chapter 6) may occur after the onset phase is complete (and therefore transmitted uncolored to the listener). By defini­ tion the first reflection certainly occurs after part of the note onset has been heard uncolored. The onset phase is therefore a vital element and the off­ set phase an important factor in terms of timbre perception. — David Howard, Jamie Angus, coustics and Psychoacoustics, 1469 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

If the group delay introduced by a communication channel is not smooth with frequency, and has abrupt phase delay differences in adjacent frequencies, the above-mentioned rules no longer apply. One such typical response is reverberation, where, at frequencies over the critical frequency (see Section 2.4.4), the phase response behaves randomly. In practice, most of the phase-related effects are not audible at all in reverberant conditions. When a buzzy signal is filtered with such a random phase response, the buzzyness vanishes, and the firing rate spectrogram resembles the lower-right plot in Figure 11.11. If the phase delay is changed at one frequency in such a case, almost invariably, no audible changes are introduced. In other words, a phase-sensitive signal can be made phase-insensitive by adding the effect of room reverberation to it. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1281 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Phase relations of partials do not affect perceived timbre.; Piano timbre would be unstable if we heard phase changes.; Phase randomization alters timbre more than 4 dB amplitude randomization (+7 more)

Broader Connections

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