The perceptual attack time of musical tones

Perceptual attack time (PAT) is defined as the time a tone's moment of attack or most salient metrical feature is perceived relative to its physical onset. Experiments are described that measured the PATs of recorded orchestral instrument tones by means of an interactive procedure with a computer and digital music synthesizer. Some PAT prediction models were then developed and tested against the empirical data. The most successful model had a correlation of 0.995 between measured and predicted PATs. The PAT is dependent on both rise time and listening level, indicating that the slope of the rise function is a key factor. Duration and spectrum can also act as cues to PAT, but are much less influential than amplitude or intensity cues. Possible relations to findings in physiology, particularly to the phenomenon of short-term adaptation in the firing of auditory fibers, are discussed.