Fischer et al. (2021) studied the blends of multi-instrument streams in the context of orchestral stream segregation in predominantly Romantic orchestral excerpts. They found that within-family instrument combinations blended better than between-family combinations. They demonstrated the role played by overlap in timbre correlates of spectral flatness (a measure of the tonalness/noisiness or density of the spectrum), spectral skewness (related to the shape of the spectral envelope), and spectral variation (evolution of the spectral envelope over time), as well as cues derived from the scores such as onset synchrony and the consonance of concurrent pitch relations.
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