Partial-oriented listening is a mode of listening that entails attending to timbral upper partials as potential pitches, hearing out spectral prominences distinctly from timbral aggregates. Questions such as "What is the highest pitch you hear?" and "How many pitches do you hear?" invite partial-oriented listening, which can be considered a "top-down"—that is, attend to high frequencies first and then to low frequencies—top-down listening strategy. I posit the existence of a timbre-pitch continuum of percepts of upper partials arising from the confluence of top-down listening strategies (such as partial-oriented listening) and bottom-up acoustic features (such as spectral fission, my theorization of the other side of the coin to McAdams's "spectral fusion" that describes situations in which many listeners are likely to perceive a timbral upper partial as a discrete pitch). I argue that in order to best account for both flexibility of listening behaviors for any given listener as well as individual differences between listeners, it is most productive to center variance and variety along this continuum in terms of modes of listening and listening behaviors rather than "types of listeners.” In other words, any individual listener is better represented by a band of percepts along the continuum than by any one individual percept on it. I present this theoretical framework to facilitate study of the role of individual differences in timbre and pitch perception and to embrace the diversity of potential perceptual experiences that can arise from different modes of listening to the same sound.