ABSTRACT
Three-score years after Seashore’s seminal work, timbre continues to be a poorly understood attribute of music. There are several reasons for this state of affairs: (1) In comparison to the other perceptual attributes-especially pitch and loudness-timbre has received little attention in the experimental literature; (2) because of its multidimensional nature, it is difficult to manipulate timbre in a controlled scientific fashion; and (3) there is no single widely-accepted operational or constitutive definition of timbre from which researchers can build empirical methods and models.
