@article{patil2012plos,
<br>abstract = {Music is a complex acoustic experience that we often take for granted. Whether sitting at a symphony hall or enjoying a melody over earphones, we have no difficulty identifying the instruments playing, following various beats, or simply distinguishing a flute from an oboe. Our brains rely on a number of sound attributes to analyze the music in our ears. These attributes can be straightforward like loudness or quite complex like the identity of the instrument. A major contributor to our ability to recognize instruments is what is formally called ‘timbre'. Of all perceptual attributes of music, timbre remains the most mysterious and least amenable to a simple mathematical abstraction. In this work, we examine the neural underpinnings of musical timbre in an attempt to both define its perceptual space and explore the processes underlying timbre-based recognition. We propose a scheme based on responses observed at the level of mammalian primary auditory cortex and show that it can accurately predict sound source recognition and perceptual timbre judgments by human listeners. The analyses presented here strongly suggest that rich representations such as those observed in auditory cortex are critical in mediating timbre percepts.},
<br>author = {Patil, Kailash and Pressnitzer, Daniel and Shamma, Shihab and Elhilali, Mounya},
<br>doi = {10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002759},
<br>editor = {Theunissen, Frederic E.},
<br>isbn = {9550091023},
<br>issn = {1553-7358},
<br>journal = {PLoS Computational Biology},
<br>number = {11},
<br>pages = {e1002759},
<br>title = {{Music in Our Ears: The Biological Bases of Musical Timbre Perception}},
<br>url = {http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002759},
<br>volume = {8},
<br>year = {2012}
<br>}