Perceptually Correlated Parameters of Musical Instrument Tones

Abstract

In Western music culture instruments have been developed according to unique instrument acoustical features based on types of excitation, resonance, and radiation. These include the woodwind, brass, bowed and plucked string, and percussion families of instruments. On the other hand, instrument performance depends on musical training, and music listening depends on perception of instrument output. Since musical signals are easier to understand in the frequency domain than the time domain, much effort has been made to perform spectral analysis and extract salient parameters, such as spectral centroids, in order to create simplified synthesis models for musical instrument sound synthesis. Moreover, perceptual tests have been made to determine the relative importance of various parameters, such as spectral centroid variation, spectral incoherence, and spectral irregularity. It turns out that the importance of particular parameters depends on both their strengths within musical sounds as well as the robustness of their effect on perception. Methods that the author and his colleagues have used to explore timbre perception are: 1) discrimination of parameter reduction or elimination; 2) dissimilarity judgments together with multidimensional scaling; 3) informal listening to sound morphing examples. This paper discusses ramifications of this work for sound synthesis and timbre transposition.

Music Recommendation Based on Multidimensional Description and Similarity Measures

“…Terasawa et al [31] suggested that the spectral envelope of a sound is an important aspect of timbre perception, thus this is one of the crucial music descriptors. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are used extensively in Automatic Speech Recognition, but also are often chosen for its subjective perception meaning [3]. This was also suggested by Horner et al [10] and Sofianos et al in their studies [30].…”

Auditory Display Applied to Research in Music and Acoustics

“…Acoustics reproduces music by means of loudspeaker systems radiating sound, but it depends on human perception, another common feature linking both fields. Instrument performance depends on musical training, and music listening depends on perception (Beauchamp, 2011). Music Technology (MT), an important part of music, covers many areas related not only to Music Information Retrieval (MIR) but also to fields conceptually closer to Auditory Display (AD) such as musical interaction, performance modeling, music cognition, synthesis and digital audio effects.…”