Perceptual distance in timbre space

Abstract

This paper describes a perceptual space for timbre, defines an ob- jective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality, and measures the quality of timbre interpolation applicable to percep- tually valid timbral sonification. We discuss two timbre represen- tations and measure perceptual judgment. We determined that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) is a good model for perceptual timbre space.