Musicians and music listeners often describe timbre (the "quality" or "color" of sound) with words such as "bright" or "warm", "ethereal" or "metallic". The purpose of our study is to investigate the relationship between auditory perception and language in this context.

We are interested in finding out what words people use to describe sounds -- and whether everyone uses a common vocabulary, or whether the choice of words is related to a person's musical or cultural background -- and how the chosen words relate to a sound's timbral characteristics.