Contribution of the right temporal lobe to musical timbre discrimination

Patients with unilateral temporal lobe excisions and normal control subjects were tested in timbre discrimination tasks in which the stimuli differed by either the number of harmonics (a spectral cue) or by the duration of the rise and fall times (a time cue). Patients with right temporal lobe lesions exhibited a significant deficit in discriminating both spectral and time information, in comparison to patients with left temporal lobe lesions and normal control subjects. This finding suggests that musical timbre perception, examined in a psychoacoustic sense, depends on neural systems found within the right temporal lobe.