The amplitude of many sounds in our environment comes on abruptly and decays gradually over time. The sounds produced when an object is struck produce this kind of sound pattern. Some waveform examples are shown below. These waveforms show amplitude on the vertical axis and time along the horizontal one.
The upper panel shows a strike of a snare drum whereas the lower two panels represent the word "time" spoken by a male talker. In the middle panel, the word "time" is spoken in a small room whereas the lower panel has echoes present because it was produced in a large auditorium (simulated). In the auditorium, the sound takes longer to decay due to echoes or reverberation.
Listen to the following tones played frontwards and backwards and judge for yourself which one is longer. The tone played frontwards has the same waveform shape (envelope) as the waveforms above. The backwards one is the same sound simply reversed in time.
Even though both tones are the same physical duration (1/10th of a second) the second one with its amplitude coming on slowly and decaying quickly sounds longer. This same finding holds for more complex sounds such as speech and sounds produced by musical instruments.
The explanation for the finding likely has a cognitive component. Persons may ignore the decay of a sound because they perceive it as an echo. My students and I describe the various hypotheses in our scientific papers on this topic (see papers related to ramped and damped sounds or rising intensity and falling intensity sound in my CV).
Some definitions of timbre describe it as the attribute of a sound that enables a listener to judge one sound as dissimilar from another sound using criteria other than pitch, loudness and duration. Timbre is what enables us to recognize different musical instruments when they play the same note. Our findings suggest that studies of timbre should match sounds for their subjective duration rather than their physical duration.
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