Timbre Perception Test (TPT)

The TPT is a test to measure an individual's ability on timbre perception. This R package is for running the TPT locally and it is implemented using psychTestR, a package for designing and running psychological experiments with R.

Citation

The TPT is introduced in the following paper:

Lee, H., & Müllensiefen, D. (2020). The Timbre Perception Test (TPT): A new interactive musical assessment tool to measure timbre perception ability. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82(7), 3658–3675. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-020-02058-3

We advise mentioning the software versions you used, in particular the versions of the tptR and psychTestR packages. You can find these version numbers from R by running the following commands:

library(tptR)
library(psychTestR)
if (!require(devtools)) install.packages("devtools")
x <- devtools::session_info()
x$packages[x$packages$package %in% c("tptR", "psychTestR"), ]

Standalone Installation (local use)

1. If you don't have R installed, install it from here: https://cloud.r-project.org/

2. Open R.

3. Install the ‘devtools’ package with the following command:

install.packages('devtools')

4. Install the tptR:

devtools::install_github('harin-git/tptR')

Usage

You can simply run experiments locally by setting the admin password and researcher email to display to the participants.

library(tptR)
tptR::TPT_standalone(password, your_email)

# For example:
tptR::TPT_standalone("1234", "john@gmail.com")

# You can try a quick demo with no input arguments
tptR::TPT_demo()

Feedback

At the end of the experiment, participant will receive a feedback score out of 100.

Interpreting Results

Once participants complete the experiment locally, the data is stored in the "output" folder. Inside the "output/results" you will find all recorded sessions.

Participant's performance scores are recorded in three ways:

1. Column names starting with "raw ..." shows the raw slider values the participant positioned for the particular trial.

2. Column names starting with "abs ..." shows the absolute values of raw value - target value (i.e. absolute slider distance from the target position).

3. Column names starting with "bin ..." shows the calculated bin scores out of 6 very similar to the method discussed in the paper. We recommend using these bin scores rather than absolute values.

Aggregated TPT scores:

For convenience, the results table includes mean scores for each of the three testing blocks (e.g. tpt_env_score). These are aggregated based on the bin scores and then converted into scores out of 100. The general score (i.e. tpt_general_score) is also reported by taking the mean across all blocks.