Exploring Instrument Blending as a Function of Timbre Saliency
Song Hui Chon, Stephen E. McAdams · 2012
Background Timbre is what enables us to distinguish two instruments playing the same note at the same pitch and loudness. The main focus of the timbre research for the last 30 years has been to determine the acoustic correlates of timbre dissimilarity space dimensions, using isolated sounds of instrument timbres. However, understanding timbre spaces of isolated tones does not help much with real-world cases - the perception of combined timbres. There are orchestration handbooks with much-used examples, although their underlying principles have not yet been scientifically studied. We conjecture that timbre saliency, the attention-capturing quality of timbre (Chon & McAdams, 2012), might be a factor behind some of these examples. Aims Saliency refers to the character of being able to draw people's attention. If something is salient, it implies that it does not blend well with its surroundings. In this paper, we explore the perception of blending of two instrument timbres as a function of timbre saliency. Method A rating experiment was carried out to understand the relationship between blending and timbre saliency. The stimuli were generated from 15 Western orchestral instrument sounds from the Vienna Symphonic Library, all of which were equalized in terms of pitch (C4), loudness and effective duration to minimize the impact of these parameters in the experimental task. The instruments are CL (clarinet), EH (English horn), FH (French horn), FL (flute), HA (harp), HC (harpsichord), MA (marimba), OB (oboe), PF (piano), TB (tubular bells), TN (trombone), TP (trumpet), TU (tuba), VC (violoncello) and VP (vibraphone). There were 105 composite sounds generated for the experiment by combining all pairs of