timbre, sampling and visuals

Musical timbre was arguably one of the most developed features during the last century. The study of musical timbre has led to a new understanding of human perception.
On a recent study, Bailes (2006) has studied the role of timbre in musical imagery. In the pilot experiment, music students had to do timbre discrimination tasks by hearing a melody in which each note was played by a different set of sampled orchestral instruments. However, nine of the respondents later said that the use of sampled sounds was a disadvantage for them in order to answer correctly. As Bailes states, "the recognition and identification of the stimulus sounds were particularly important for three participants who explained that they would tend to visualise an instrument or instrumentalist when imaging a timbre".
This suggests that the use of sampled sounds can tend to vanish the image of someone or something being played. This is particularly interesting, as the use of samples is a very popular technique among musicians nowadays. It may be possible that some musical styles which use samples frequently produce to listeners the feeling that the artist and/or the instrument is absent. Therefore, some people consider that visual external stimuli, such as the use of lights and video performances may serve as a perceptual substitute.
Sampling somehow exists since 1948, when composer and theorist Pierre Schaeffer performed his works on tape manipulation.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schaeffer
Bailes, Freya: "Timbre as an Elusive Component of Imagery for Music", 2006.

musical timbre as an adaptive feature? Timbre and image building.

1.Why is musical timbre so well developed? Is it an evolutionary adaptation? Following David Huron's work, are we able to say that timbre recognition development could be an advantage for humans? Maybe it is possible to build a timbre history. What we today call timbre recognition was arguably one of the most important safety measures that primitive humans had during the night. Timbre perception was highly developed in order to recognize potencially dangerous animals that they could not see in the dark. Humans were actually able to imitate these dangerous sounds with their pitch and timbral scales. Sound imitation was used to communicate which timbres should people be aware of.
Probably the first musical instruments that were studied by humans were animals. Humans may have needed to organize the timbral, rhythmical and pitch related features of dangerous animals. Grunts, growls and steps were analyzed in order to build a functional image of the animal that could let them decide whether to escape or fight against the animal.
Now we are able to go back again to Huron's work on music and social bond theory. It is also possible to study the interaction between mother and child during development, where music and movement are heavily related. Temporal arts could be the result of these development. In my opinion, art could have been useless itself, but an unconscious preparation for survival may have been developed.
It may be useful to make a blend between musical studies and psychoacoustic studies in order to study these topics in detail.