Physical and perceptual aspects of percussive timbre

This dissertation explores relationships between perceptual dimensions of percussive timbres and measurements produced by several signal analysis algorithms. The literature of psychophysical timbre experiments since 1941 is reviewed with respect to two contrasting approaches. The earliest attempts at unraveling the interdependent aspects of timbre perception employed multiple adjective scales intended to describe various sonic features. Following developments in the technique of multidimensional scaling (MDS) in the 1960s, several researchers began to apply scaling techniques to data sets of timbre similarity judgments. At present, the majority of timbre studies are based on MDS. In spite of such advancements, the range of musical timbres has only begun to be explored from a perceptual viewpoint, and a significant gap exists in the literature for percussive instruments.;The signal analysis algorithms employed in this research are introduced in the context of timbre---a timbre analysis software library written by the author. The library's adaptability is illustrated with respect to several musical research applications in Pure data. This flexibility is shown to be beneficial in the case of two percussive instrument classification tests, in which the effectiveness of perceptually weighted spectral features like mel- and Bark-frequency cepstrum are evaluated alongside other standard analysis techniques from the music information retrieval literature.;In the final chapter, a perceptual experiment involving 30 diverse percussion timbres is carried out. The study confirms the importance of spectral centroid and attack duration as predictors of perceptual dimensions, and reveals two additional dimensions that may be unique to percussive timbres: "dryness" and "noisiness". A predictive model is generated using multiple linear regression, and results indicate that the noisiness dimension cannot be predicted as accurately as dimensions relating to spectral center of gravity and attack time. Thus, there is a clear need for an effective measure of perceptual noisiness for accurate description of percussive timbre.