Search results for "Timbre"

The socially distributed cognition of musical timbre : a convergence of semantic, perceptual, and acoustic aspects

2012

Emotional Connotations of Musical Instrument Timbre in Comparison With Emotional Speech Prosody: Evidence From Acoustics and Event-Related Potentials

2018

Music and speech both communicate emotional meanings in addition to their domain-specific contents. But it is not clear whether and how the two kinds of emotional meanings are linked. The present study is focused on exploring the emotional connotations of musical timbre of isolated instrument sounds through the perspective of emotional speech prosody. The stimuli were isolated instrument sounds and emotional speech prosody categorized by listeners into anger, happiness and sadness, respectively. We first analyzed the timbral features of the stimuli, which showed that relations between the three emotions were relatively consistent in those features for speech and music. The results further e…

Music, emotion, and time perception: the influence of subjective emotional valence and arousal?

2013

The present study used a temporal bisection task with short (< 2 s) and long (> 2 s) stimulus durations to investigate the effect on time estimation of several musical parameters associated with emotional changes in affective valence and arousal. In order to manipulate the positive and negative valence of music, Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the effect of musical structure with pieces played normally and backwards, which were judged to be pleasant and unpleasant, respectively. This effect of valence was combined with a subjective arousal effect by changing the tempo of the musical pieces (fast vs. slow) (Experiment 1) or their instrumentation (orchestral vs. piano pieces). The musica…

Influences of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features on characteristics of music-induced movement

2013

Music makes us move. Several factors can affect the characteristics of such movements, including individual factors or musical features. For this study, we investigated the effect of rhythm- and timbre-related musical features as well as tempo on movement characteristics. Sixty participants were presented with 30 musical stimuli representing different styles of popular music, and instructed to move along with the music. Optical motion capture was used to record participants’ movements. Subsequently, eight movement features and four rhythm- and timbre-related musical features were computationally extracted from the data, while the tempo was assessed in a perceptual experiment. A subsequent c…

Testing a spectral-based feature set for audio genre classification

2011

Automatic musical genre classification is an important information retrieval task since it can be applied for practical purposes such as the organization of data collections in the digital music industry. However, this task remains an open question because the current state of the art shows far from satisfactory outcomes in terms of classification performance. Moreover, the most common algorithms that are used for this task are not designed for modelling music perception. This study suggests a framework for testing different musical features for use in music genre classification and evaluates the performance of this task based on two musical descriptors. The focus of this study is on automa…

Mild Dissonance Preferred Over Consonance in Single Chord Perception

2016

Previous research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony, turning less attention to how listeners perceive psychoacoustic qualities and emotions in single isolated chords. A recent study found mild dissonances to be more preferred than consonances in single chord perception, although the authors did not systematically vary register and consonance in their study; these omissions were explored here. An online empirical experiment was conducted where participants ( N = 410) evaluated chords on the dimensions of Valence, Tension, Energy, Consonance, and Preference; 15 different chords were played with piano timbre across two octaves. The results sugg…

Emotional expression in music: contribution, linearity, and additivity of primary musical cues

2013

The aim of this study is to manipulate musical cues systematically to determine the aspects of music that contribute to emotional expression, and whether these cues operate in additive or interactive fashion, and whether the cue levels can be characterized as linear or non-linear. An optimized factorial design was used with six primary musical cues (mode, tempo, dynamics, articulation, timbre, and register) across four different music examples. Listeners rated 200 musical examples according to four perceived emotional characters (happy, sad, peaceful, and scary). The results exhibited robust effects for all cues and the ranked importance of these was established by multiple regression. The …

The role of timbre in the memorization of microtonal intervals

2007

In search of perceptual and acoustical correlates of polyphonic timbre

2009

Polyphonic timbre refers to the overall timbre mixture of a music signal, or in simple words, the 'global sound' of any piece of music. It has been proven to be an important element for computational categorization according to genre, style, mood, and emotions, but its perceptual constituents have been less investigated. The aim of the study is to determine the most salient features of polyphonic timbre perception by investigating the descriptive auditory qualities of music and mapping acoustic features to these descriptors. Descriptors of monophonic timbre taken from previous literature were used as a starting point. Based on three pilot studies, eight scales were chosen for the actual exp…

Effect of Enculturation on the Semantic and Acoustic Correlates of Polyphonic Timbre

2011

polyphonic timbre perception was investigated in a cross-cultural context wherein Indian and Western nonmusicians rated short Indian and Western popular music excerpts (1.5 s, n = 200) on eight bipolar scales. Intrinsic dimensionality estimation revealed a higher number of perceptual dimensions in the timbre space for music from one's own culture. Factor analyses of Indian and Western participants' ratings resulted in highly similar factor solutions. The acoustic features that predicted the perceptual dimensions were similar across the two participant groups. Furthermore, both the perceptual dimensions and their acoustic correlates matched closely with the results of a previous study perfor…