Wessel Illusion PureData Patch

This project was the final for MUS 175 - Psychoacoustics with Professor Tamara Smyth. The tasks for this project were to research a topic within psychoacoustics and present either a creative work or a technical application of the phenomena in class. I chose to explore timbre space, referencing David Wessel's paper on "Timbre Space as a Musical Control Structure". The specific auditory phenomenon from the paper that I wanted to bring attention to is what is now titled the "Wessel Illusion", which is essentially stream segregation using timbre. The idea behind the illusion is that when we hear two sounds played in an alternating sequence, past a certain tempo, we go from hearing them as one sequence of alternating notes to two sequences of notes with differing timbres. To exemplify this, I created an experiment showcasing this, where a user can choose two different sounds and record the point at which they start to separate the audio streams. By doing this to multiple sounds and referencing the data, the participant can see how different timbres of sound affect their perception of said streams.