The Emotional Characteristics and Timbre of Nonsustaining Instrument Sounds

Chau, Chuck-jee; Wu, Bin; Horner, Andrew

doi:10.17743/jaes.2015.0016

Cited by 19 publications

(30 citation statements)

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“…Wu et al [2,4,31,32] and Chau et al [3,5] compared the emotional characteristics of sustaining and nonsustaining instruments. Like Ellermeier [18], they used a BTL model to rank paired comparisons of eight sounds.…”

Section: Papers the Effects Of Reverberation On The Emotional Charactmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Effects of Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instruments

Mo¹,

Wu²,

Horner³

2016

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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Though previous research has shown the effects of reverberation on clarity, spaciousness, and other perceptual aspects of music, it is still largely unknown to what extent reverberation influences the emotional characteristics of musical instrument sounds. This paper investigates the effect of simple parametric reverberation on music emotion, in particular, the effect of reverberation length and amount. We conducted a listening test to compare the effect of reverberation on the emotional characteristics of eight instrument sounds representing the wind and bowed string families. We compared these sounds over eight emotional categories. We found that reverberation length and amount had a strongly significant effect on the emotional characteristics Romantic and Mysterious and a medium effect on Sad, Scary, and Heroic for the samples we tested. Interestingly, for Comic, reverberation length and amount had the opposite effect; that is, anechoic tones were judged most Comic. Reverb had a mild effect on Happy and relatively little effect on Shy. These results give audio engineers and musicians an interesting perspective on simple parametric artificial reverberation. INTRODUCTIONPrevious research has shown that musical instrument sounds have strong and distinctive emotional characteristics [1][2][3][4][5]. For example, that the trumpet is happier in character than the horn, even in isolated sounds apart from musical context.In light of this, one might wonder what effect reverberation has on the character of music emotion. This leads to a host of follow-up questions: Do all emotional characteristics become stronger with more reverberation? Or, are some emotional characteristics affected more and others less (e.g., positive emotional characteristics more, negative less)? In particular, what are the effects of reverberation time and amount? What are the effects of hall size and listener position? Which instruments sound emotionally stronger to listeners in the front or back of small and large halls? Are dry sounds without reverberation emotionally dry as well, or, do they have distinctive emotional characteristics?We cannot address all of the above questions definitively in this paper with only a simple parametric reverberator and a few parameter settings, but we can make a good start. This work will give audio engineers and musicians an interesting perspective on simple parametric artificial reverberation. More studies with different reverberation models and parameters should be carried out to get more definitive answers. Understanding how listeners perceive emotional characteristics in reverberation can help us engineer potentially even more expressive recordings and opens new possibilities for interactive music systems and applications. BACKGROUND Music Emotion and TimbrePrevious work has investigated emotion recognition in music, especially addressing melody [6], harmony [7,8], rhythm [9,10], lyrics [11], and localization cues [12]. Similarly, researchers have found timbre to be useful in a number of applications such ...

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Section: Papers the Effects Of Reverberation On The Emotional Charactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Previous research has shown that musical instrument sounds have strong and distinctive emotional characteristics [1][2][3][4][5]. For example, that the trumpet is happier in character than the horn, even in isolated sounds apart from musical context.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instruments

Mo¹,

Wu²,

Horner³

2016

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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“…In our previous study [29] we found that emotional characteristics were clear for very short sounds of 0.25 s duration, but only for mid-register pitches. To allow listeners to hear the details of the attack and early decay well for the lowest pitches, we could not use a duration too short, and 1 s tones were the best compromise in length.…”

Section: Stimulimentioning

confidence: 74%

“…Characteristics and Pitch, Dynamic, and Spectral Features Pitch, dynamic, and spectral features for each of the sounds are given in Tables 9 and 10 in the Appendix (the spectral features are described in detail in [29,62,63]). Correlations between these features and the BTL values in Fig.…”

Section: Correlation Between Emotionalmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Emotional Characteristics of Bowed String Instruments with Different Pitch and Dynamics

Chau¹,

Gilburt²,

Mo³

et al. 2017

J. Audio Eng. Soc.

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Previous research has shown that different musical instrument sounds have strong emotional characteristics. This paper investigates how emotional characteristics vary with pitch and dynamics within the bowed string instrument family. We conducted listening tests to compare the effects of pitch and dynamics on the violin, viola, cello, and double bass. Listeners compared the sounds pairwise over 10 emotional categories. Results showed that the emotional characteristics Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic, and Calm generally increased with pitch but decreased at the highest pitches. Angry and Sad generally decreased with pitch. Scary was strong in the extreme low and high registers, while Shy and Mysterious were unaffected by pitch. For dynamics, the results showed that Heroic, Comic, and Angry were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Shy, Sad, and the high register for Happy were stronger for soft notes. Scary and Mysterious were unaffected by dynamics. The results also showed significant differences between different bowed string instruments on notes of the same pitch and dynamic level. These results help quantify our understanding of the relative emotional characteristics of the strings. They provide audio engineers and musicians with suggestions for emphasizing emotional characteristics of the bowed strings in sound recordings and performances.

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Research on Emotional Feature Mapping of Artificial Intelligence Based on Brain Wave Images

Zhang

2018

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

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The Emotional Characteristics and Timbre of Nonsustaining Instrument Sounds

Cited by 19 publications

References 0 publications

The Effects of Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instruments

The Effects of Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instruments

The Emotional Characteristics of Bowed String Instruments with Different Pitch and Dynamics

Research on Emotional Feature Mapping of Artificial Intelligence Based on Brain Wave Images

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