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Timbre Game (BETA)

About


The Timbre Game is an online, collaborative game that illustrates concept of musical timbre through interactive gaming interfaces. In addition, the game serves as a tool for engineering education and the collection of human evaluation data. The Timbre Game contains two interfaces, Tone Bender and Tone Listener, which allow for the creation and identification of musical sounds, respectively. The purpose of Tone Bender is to have players modify the timbre of musical instrument sounds and to collect those sounds in a database. Players can then listen to the sounds others have created in the Tone Listener interface in order to determine if they can identify the original instrument. Read on to learn about the different game interfaces.

Tone Bender


The Tone Bender interface allows users to modify the timbre of musical instrument sounds by allowing control of the time varying amplitude envelope and spectral envelope. Modification can be accomplished by simply clicking and dragging the on-screen control points or by using the drop down menus, which have pre-defined amplitude shapes. After modification, the user can playback their new sounds and they are shown a potential score which is based on the SNR between the original sound and their modified sound. The score is directly proportional to the change they impart on the sound (i.e. more change, more points). The player's incentive is to create a sound that differs in some way from the original, but is still recognizable. They are awarded the potential score if someone can guess the original identity of their modified instrument in the Tone Listener interface. When the player is finished with a sound, they submit the parameters to a database and load another sound to modify.

Tone Listener


The Tone Listener interface allows players to test their ability to identify a musical instrument from a modified instrument created in the Tone Bender interface. Players are given a randomly selected sound that is synthesized from parameters defined by a player in Tone Modifier. After listening to the sound, they attempt to guess the family and instrument type that the modified sound was generated from. If the correctly guess the instrument, they receive a score proportional to the SNR of the modified sound, so that identification of "harder" sounds is rewarded more than "easier" ones. On the other hand, if they guess the family correctly, they receive half of the potential score.

Background


Little research has been conducted regarding human response to modified audio stimulus, in particular speech and musical sounds. The Timbre Game serves as a tool that can educate users on the underlying psychoacoustic concepts that comprise musical sounds. Additionally, it provides a method to collect data regarding how well humans identify musical sounds subject to timbre modification. Timbre is often described as the "quality" or "color" of a sound. To avoid ambiguities, this game treats timbre as the time varying amplitude envelope and spectral envelope that characterize a musical sound. The Timbre Game allows users to modify the sound of a musical instrument with the incentive to change it in some way, but retain the identity of the original instrument. This interface provides an opportunity to teach players how the time and spectral envelopes affect perceived sound. Players are shown a potential score that they will receive if another player can correctly identify the original instrument. This projected score is related to the deviation of the altered sound compared to the original, which is measured using SNR. Lower SNR correlates to a higher potential score so that players are encouraged to create intelligible sounds. In the listening component of the game, a player will listen to modified sounds and attempt to correctly identify the original instrument's identity and family. The listening component of the game allows us to analyze how humans perform when identifying musical sounds with modified timbre.