Past Theoretical Approaches:

  • Pierre Schaeffer (1966)
    Traité des objets musicaux

  • Robert Cogan & Pozzi Escot (1976)
    Sonic Design

  • Wayne Slawson (1985)
    Sound Color

  • Fred Lerdahl (1987)
    Timbral hierarchies

Past Experimental Approaches:

  1. acoustic feature detection
    (e.g. von Bismarck, 1974; Freed, 1990)

  2. multi-dimensional scaling
    (e.g., Grey, 1975, 1977; Howard & Silverman, 1976)

  3. ecological acoustics
    (e.g., Warren & Verbrugge, 1984; Li, Logan & Pastore, 1991)

  4. acoustic evolutionary psychology
    (e.g., Scherer, 1986; Morton, 1994; Ohala, 1994)