Further spectral correlations of timbral adjectives used by musicians
Alastair C. Disley, David M. Howard, Andrew D. Hunt · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2006
As part of a project to develop a synthesis interface which nontechnical musicians should find intuitive, the adjectives musicians use to describe timbre have been studied in a large-scale listening test covering the timbre space of Western orchestral instruments. These were refined in previous work by the authors (A. C. Disley et al. ‘‘Spectral correlations of timbral adjectives used by musicians,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119, 3333, (2006)] to a set of ten words which had good common understanding and discrimination between the samples (bright, clear, dull, gentle, harsh, nasal, percussive, ringing, thin, and warm). To help explore potential relationships between these adjectives and spectral features, 20 listeners participated in a further listening experiment, comparing samples in pairs to produce dissimilarity data. Multidimensional scaling produced dimensions which were compared with a large number of spectral and time-domain analyses of the stimuli, suggesting a number of significantly correlated spectral cues with some of the adjectives. These results are compared with previous studies by the authors and others, showing both similarities and differences, suggesting that collective consideration of timbral adjectives is more likely to result in simultaneously applicable theories of acoustic correlates than individual consideration of words.