The study of musical timbre by Bailes (2007) raises important
questions concerning the relative ease of imaging complex perceptual attributes such as
timbre, compared to more unidimensional attributes. I also raise the issue of individual
differences in auditory imagery ability, especially for timbre

Halpern, Andrea

Empirical Musicology Review

Andrea Halpern

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Commentary on "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music," by Freya Bailes

The study of musical timbre by Bailes (2007) raises important questions concerning the relative ease of imaging complex perceptual attributes such as timbre, compared to more unidimensional attributes. I also raise the issue of individual differences in auditory imagery ability, especially for timbre

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Halpern, Andrea R

Bucknell University

Bucknell University Bucknell Digital Commons Faculty Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2007 Commentary on "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music" by Freya Bailes Andrea Halpern Bucknell University, ahalpern@bucknell.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bucknell.edu/fac_journ  Part of the Musicology Commons Recommended Citation Halpern, Andrea. "Commentary on "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music" by Freya Bailes." Empirical Musicology Review (2007) : 31-33. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Bucknell Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Bucknell Digital Commons. For more information, please contact dcadmin@bucknell.edu. Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 2, No. 1, 200735Commentary on “Timbre as an Elusive Component ofImagery for Music,” by Freya BailesANDREA R. HALPERNBucknell UniversityABSTRACT: The study of musical timbre by Bailes (2007) raises importantquestions concerning the relative ease of imaging complex perceptual attributes such astimbre, compared to more unidimensional attributes.  I also raise the issue of individualdifferences in auditory imagery ability, especially for timbre.Submitted 2006 November 21; Accepted 2006 November 25KEYWORDS: timbre, mental imagery, perception, memory, methodology, individualdifferencesTIMBRE has a somewhat paradoxical status in music psychology.  The literature on timbre perception andmemory is small compared to music cognition studies on dimensions such as pitch and rhythm.  On the onehand,  we find that people can discriminate and classify timbre reasonably well. This is demonstrated in thepretests of the article by Bailes (2007) as well as in numerous studies showing that musical timbres arementally represented in a regular manner, some of which Bailes cites.  And of course, composers select andthen change timbres to convey various musical messages.On the other hand, timbre perception is influenced by pitch (Krumhansl & Iverson, 1992),suggesting it is not an independent dimension.  It is also not an easy dimension to remember:  I havenumerous experiments in my bottom drawer showing a failure of participants to remember what instrumentplayed a given tune during a study list.  Even indirect demonstrations of timbre memory can be hard toobtain.  In a musical stem completion task, I found no effect of timbre change on ability to rememberexplicitly, by singing the requested note, what note came next after the first few notes of a studied tune wasplayed.  Nor did I find a detrimental effect of timbre change on the implicit task of producing a note that“sounded good,” where a higher rate of correct completions on studied vs. unstudied items would indicatepreserved implicit memory (Warker & Halpern, 2005).Matching a timbre to an entire tune may be a challenging binding task.  The few studies in timbreimagery have typically asked participants to imagine single notes.  Crowder (1989) found interferenceeffects from timbre in a pitch-matching task when the imagined tone of one pitch did not match the actualtone of another pitch (also showing the pitch-timbre interdependence referred to above).  Pitt and Crowder(1992) likewise used single tones to investigate spectral vs. dynamic aspects of timbre imagery. AndHalpern et al. (2004) asked participants to imagine single tones of various instruments for a similarityrating task.  All of these studies used single tones for a good reason: to insure that the timbre in questionwas active in working memory at the time the particular discrete judgment was made.  And they also serveto show that people can (in the case of similarity judgments) or must (in the case of interference effects)reactivate what appear to be perceptual-like representations of timbre.Bailes points out that it would also be useful to examine timbre imagery for more extendedmusical passages, although it is perhaps unduly strong to say that the previous studies cannot begeneralized at all to the extended situation.   The current study has some similarities to previous ones, inthat some comparison is made between perceptual and imaginal judgments.  Also congruent with previousstudies, judgments made when part of the stimulus is imagined led to lower performance levels than whenthe stimulus is heard.  As we pointed out in our 2004 article, participants in Crowder’s (1989) study wereabout 500 ms slower to carry out pitch matching when the first note of a pair was imagined rather thanheard, and in one of our earlier studies, average accuracy in a pitch comparison task within a song fell from85% in a heard version to 73% when the song was imagined (Zatorre & Halpen, 1993).  In the 2004 study,the multidimensional scaling solution for imagined instruments was less regular than that for perceivedEmpirical Musicology Review Vol. 2, No. 1, 200736instruments (although the fit of the model was equally good in both cases). All of these studies converge onshowing that reactivated information provides some information, but not all the information necessary tomake timbre-related judgments.Bailes takes a different tack in both the method and conceptualization of imagery in this article.  Inboth studies she asks participants to memorize a piece of music.  In the first study, she then asks them tocompare a sounded note pair against a memory of that note pair for a same-different judgment on timbre,and manipulates whether the rest of the memorized piece is sounded or not.  So two things are really goingon here: a) matching a timbre representation to that supposedly in long-term memory and b) using thesounded intervening notes as a memory aid, insofar that it is likely that the immediately preceding note pairacts as a cue (or contrast) to the next, to-be-judged note pair.  In the second study, the timbre judgment is amore subtle change, but still involves, or could involve, the two aspects described above: memory for thelearned timbre per se, and making use of the contrast from the information immediately preceding the to-be-judged phrase.  Because results of the first study are potentially open to alternative explanationsinvolving practice effects, I prefer to concentrate on the second study.The main result is that time to make the judgment (I assume this includes all trials, as we are nottold that RT is only to correct trials) decreases from perception to imagery to control. This latter conditiontook place before the piece was learned and was meant to capture pure discrimination.  Accuracy showedthe inverse pattern in one piece and did not vary for the other piece.   We of course would not be surprisedthat actually hearing immediately preceding phrases in the baseline timbre would facilitate making a subtlecontrast with a successive timbre.  Thus the data of interest comes from comparing imagery vs. control.   Inthree of four tests (RT and accuracy x 2 pieces), imagery of the context did apparently facilitate the contrastjudgment.However, it is worthwhile examining the control condition before accepting this conclusionabsolutely.  The control condition took place before the piece was learned.  It is possible that repeatedlistening of the piece might have sharpened the ability to discriminate that heard timbre, either the overallpalette or the notes immediately preceding the target, from a filtered sound.  Presenting the controlcondition after the learning phase is feasible if one simply asks the participant to compare the two extractswithout mention of imagery or intervening music. This would be a more conclusive test of whether directedimagery of intervening music improves discrimination.  Assuming imagery still shows superiority overcontrol, then we would indeed have evidence from a new kind of indirect test of the ability of people toimagine more complex timbres than have been used previously (although not knowing the pieces inquestion, I do not actually know what the timbres were). However, we still must be cautious in assumingthat an extended phrase of music was imagined successfully, as the task could be done by imagining asmall excerpt of the piece immediately preceding the target measure.The other way in which this study differs from the other studies in timbre imagery is that by theparticipants’ own admission, they were unable to imagine the timbre.  In almost all studies of imagery that Iam familiar with, both auditory and visual, an assumption and a finding is that participants re-experiencethe percept in some way. In some studies they are directed to do so, in other studies, such as with mentalrotation, they report with high frequency an ability to “call up” the requested information and then tooperate on it.  I consulted several cognitive psychology textbooks on my shelf and most defined mentalimagery by referring to the representation of something similar to sensory experience.  Thus I am notentirely convinced that the current participants were using “imagery” as the term is standardly used, unlesswe simply equate “imagery” with any memory representation.  In these experiments, it is possible thatparticipants could have coded the baseline timbre in an abstract or verbal way.  Eliciting the subjectiveexperience of imagery would be important in any future studies of timbre imagery for these more complexmaterials, in my opinion.Nevertheless, the inability of many of Bailes’s volunteers to imagine timbre as standardly definedraised the question of individual differences in auditory imagery ability.  Crowder (1989) found that severalof his participants were absolutely unable to ignore timbre (imagined or heard) in making pitch judgments.This suggests a good ability to call up images but an inability to control the process thereafter.  Aleman,Nieuwenstein, Böcker, and de Haan (2000) compared musicians and nonmusicians in a musical pitchcomparison task that was similar to the one Zatorre and I used (1993), a nonmusical auditory imagery task,and a visual imagery task. Musicians were superior to nonmusicians in both auditory tasks, but not thevisual task, again suggesting individual differences based on training (or propensity).  In my lab, I routinelyeither ask for two years of musical training as a criterion for entry into even simple auditory imagerystudies, because I do occasionally find people seemingly incapable of generating or maintaining images.  IEmpirical Musicology Review Vol. 2, No. 1, 200737also use a questionnaire asking people to self-rate vividness and ability to control mental images, and find awide range in this self-report (and lower ratings, on average, than parallel items for visual imagery).Thus we have hints that people may vary quite a bit on ability to image musical dimensions, and itis possible that this variability would be exaggerated in aspects more difficult to imagine.  Certainlyimagining anything extended in time would put stress on working memory structures, and even for briefstimuli, Pitt and Crowder (1992) showed that the dynamic element of timbre was hard to imagine.  A longpassage of music therefore changes in time on both a fine scale (dynamic aspects of timbre) and a coarserone (as notes and rhythms unfold).   Thus it may not be surprising that consciously imagining timbre of anextended passage would be quite challenging and perhaps only accessible to those with large workingmemory spans, musical training, or both. This hypothesis could be tested in future work.REFERENCESAleman, A., Nieuwenstein,  M. R., Böcker,  K. B. E. & de Haan, E. H. F. (2000).  Music training andmental imagery ability.  Neuropsychologia, Vol. 38, pp. 1664-1668.Bailes, F.  (2007).  Timbre as an elusive component of imagery for music.  Empirical Musicology Review,Vol. 2, No. 1,  pp. 17-30.Crowder, R. G. (1989). Imagery for musical timbre. Journal of Experimental Psychology:  HumanPerception and Performance, Vol. 15, pp. 472-478.Halpern, A. R., Zatorre, R. J., Bouffard, M. & Johnson, J. (2004).  Behavioral and neural correlates ofperceived and imagined musical timbre.  Neuropsychologia, Vol. 42, pp. 1281-1292.Krumhansl, C. L.  & Iverson, P. (1992).  Perceptual interactions between musical pitch and timbre. Journalof Experimental Psychology:  Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 18, pp. 739-751.Pitt, M. A., & Crowder, R. G. (1992). The role of spectral and dynamic cues in imagery for musical timbre.Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Human Perception and Performance, Vol. 7, pp. 28-38.Warker, J. A. & Halpern, A. R.  (2005). Musical stem completion: Humming that note. American Journalof Psychology, Vol. 118, pp. 567-585.Zatorre, R. J. & Halpern, A. R. (1993).  Effect of unilateral temporal-lobe excision on perception andimagery of songs.   Neuropsychologia, Vol. 31, pp. 221-232.

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Commentary on  Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music  by Freya Bailes

ABSTRACT: The study of musical timbre by Bailes (2007) raises important questions concerning the relative ease of imaging complex perceptual attributes such as timbre, compared to more unidimensional attributes. I also raise the issue of individual differences in auditory imagery ability, especially for timbre

Commentary on "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music," by Freya Bailes

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