Effect of Enculturation on the Semantic and Acoustic Correlates of Polyphonic Timbre

Polyphonic timbre perception was investigated in a cross-cultural context wherein Indian and Western nonmusicians rated short Indian and Western popular music excerpts (1.5 s, n = 200) on eight bipolar scales. Intrinsic dimensionality estimation revealed a higher number of perceptual dimensions in the timbre space for music from one’s own culture. Factor analyses of Indian and Western participants’ ratings resulted in highly similar factor solutions. The acoustic features that predicted the perceptual dimensions were similar across the two participant groups. Furthermore, both the perceptual dimensions and their acoustic correlates matched closely with the results of a previous study performed using Western musicians as participants. Regression analyses revealed relatively well performing models for the perceptual dimensions. The models displayed relatively high cross-validation performance. The findings suggest the presence of universal patterns in polyphonic timbre perception while demonstrating the increase of dimensionality of timbre space as a result of enculturation.