Investigating the colloquial description of sound by musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

What is meant by the words used in a subjective judgment of sound? Interpreting these words accurately allows these musical descriptions of sound to be related to scientific descriptions of sound. But do musicians, scientists, instrument makers, and others mean the same things by the same words? When these groups converse about qualities of sound, they often use an expansive lexicon of terms (bright, brassy, dark, pointed, muddy, etc.). It may be inaccurate to assume that the same terms and phrases have the same meaning to these different groups of people or even remain self-consistent for a single individual. To investigate the use of words and phrases in this lexicon, subjects with varying musical and scientific backgrounds were surveyed. The subjects were asked to listen to different pieces of recorded music and asked to use their own colloquial language to describe the musical qualities and differences they perceived in these pieces. In this talk, I describe some qualitative results of this survey and identify some of the more problematic terms used by these various groups to describe sound quality.