Can listeners hear who is singing? A comparison of three-note and six-note discrimination tasks

Timbre is typically investigated as a perceptual attribute that differentiates a sound source at one pitch and loudness. Yet the perceptual usefulness of timbre is that it allows the listener to recognize one sound source at different pitches. This paper investigated the ability of listeners to identify which pitch in an ascending or descending sequence of three or six stimuli was sung by a different singer. For three-note sequences, the task was extremely difficult, and with rare exceptions, listeners chose the most dissimilarly pitched stimulus as coming from the oddball singer. For six-note sequences, the detection of the oddball singer was much improved in spite of the added complexity of the task. These results support the idea that timbre should be understood as a transformation that connects the different sounds of one source and that a "rich" set of sounds is necessary to discover the trajectory.