On the recognition of timbre - A first step toward understanding how hearing-impaired people perceive timbre

There are many hearing-impaired college students who have interest in music and some of them listen to music every day. What do hearing-impaired people enjoy in music? Among the several elements in music, focus was placed on timbre in an experiment. Timbre differs if a player plays a musical score with different musical instruments. Several sets of music data were prepared from commercial CDs in which the same phrases were played with different musical instruments and subjects were asked to listen to and compare the timbres. Subject groups consisted of hearing-impaired people, hearing people with little or no experience in playing music, and hearing people with active experience in playing music. Significant differences were found in the ability to differentiate timbre among the three groups. Hearing-impaired people were found to be good at noticing sets in which all timbres were similar by comparison but they encountered difficulties in differentiating timbres in other cases. The brightness curve was found to be a candidate as an attribute to explain these difficulties.