# Timbre Perception and Auditory Object Identification **Opening (not a real abstract):** Birds, water drips, wind, instruments, doors slamming, friends walking on wood or vinyl, objects breaking or bouncing—these are but a few of the events and objects that we can identify by sound alone. Jenkins (1984) points out that the world is eventlike, sound is produced by action and movement. Our ability to identify things by listening must be based on the information provided by their acoustic properties, and these properties are the result of the production process. The basic problem is contextual variation. I f the sound waves produced by each event were always identical, then identification would reduce to simple memorization (i.e., one sound wave to one object). But, the sound waves will not be physically identical at different times due to variations in the production process. Moreover, the sound waves generated by simultaneous events intermix so that the properties of each source are obscured. **Authors:** [[Timbre Perception and Auditory]]