Musical timbre: Similarity ratings correlate with computational feature space distances*

Abstract

Abstract Tarahe paper compares mappings of a set of synthetic timbre stimuli on a Kohonen self‐organizing topology and the distance matrix derived from subjects' similarity ratings concerning the same stimuli. Significant correlation is reported between the two domains. This result is interpreted to provide support for a more general hypothesis implicit in many current connectionist studies, namely that to represent is to project complexes of multidimensional environmental‐perceptual conditions onto less dimensionally defined, ordered neural‐mental responses. Notes Sound examples are available in the JNMR Electronic Appendix (EA) which can be found on the WWW at http://www.swets.nl/jnmr/jnmr.html