A response to Andrea R. Halpern's commentary

"In my paper I tentatively speculate as to why imaging timbre might be different to imaging pitch and rhythm, and it seems that my speculation generally fits with Halpern’s ideas. However, where I differ in my approach to timbre imagery is to view it as a primarily musical phenomenon. As Halpern writes, most research in this area concerns the imaging of an isolated instrument timbre (Crowder, 1989; Halpern, Zatorre, Bouffard, and Johnson, 2004; Pitt and Crowder, 1992). The important strength of this research is the controlled establishment of imagery properties such as the mean time required to report imaging an instrument tone (Crowder, 1989), spectral over dynamic features (Pitt and Crowder, 1992), and overlaps between imagery and perception of timbre in brain activation (Halpern et al., 2004)."