Most of the difficulties connected with verbal determination and quantification of the phenomenon called "timbre" or "sound colorw are caused by the multidimensional nature of this perceptual attribute of sound. After giving a brief historical review of the methodological evolution of the research on the perception of musical timbre, this paper illustrates some of the appropriate psychoacoustical research methods and associated statistical techniques by use of examples from the investigations of trombone timbre and overall sound quality made in WZORT, Prague in the course of the last decade. The verbal timbre descriptions obtained in a postal survey and through interviews, as well as the non-verbal data (gained both in a series of listening tests and through the spectral analysis of trombone tones), were processed by various multivariate statistical methods such as hierarchical clustering, factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, multiple linear regression, etc. The resultant findings are compared and discussed.
Violin timbre was studied for five tone pitches (H3, F ♯4, C5, G5, D6). A set of violin tones played on different instruments was recorded in an anechoic room. The recordings were subsequently manipulated to weaken an influence of tone transient parts on the perception. Two pair listening tests in headphones were performed for each pitch: timbre dissimilarity scaling test and spontaneous verbal description of timbre dissimilarities. A perceptual timbre space was constructed from the results of dissimilarity scaling test for each pitch using the multidimensional scaling method. Projections of verbal descriptions into the perceptual spaces enabled their external interpretation. Some perceptual attributes and pairs of attributes of violin timbre were established (‘‘narrow,’’ ‘‘rustle,’’ ‘‘soft’’–‘‘sharp,’’ ‘‘dark’’–‘‘bright,’’ ‘‘clear’’–‘‘blurred’’) based on correlation analysis of word occurrence frequencies on individual tones and on comparison of word projection coordinates in perceptual spaces. Comparing the results for five studied pitches it was possible to pronounce the hypothesis of salient violin timbre dimensions.
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