The Emotional Characteristics and Timbre of Nonsustaining Instrument Sounds
Chuck-jee Chau, Bin Wu, Andrew Horner · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2015
Recent research has shown the connection between timbre and music emotion and has focused on sustaining instruments. This paper undertakes listening tests to investigate the connection for nonsustaining instruments including plucked string, pitched percussion, and keyboard sounds compared pairwise by listening test subjects over eight emotional categories. Different durations were studied to investigate the effect of early release on the emotional characteristics. The experiments showed that the harpsichord, marimba, vibraphone, and xylophone were highly rated for positive emotional characteristics; the guitar, harp, and plucked violin were highly rated for negative emotional characteristics; and the piano was rated emotionally neutral. There were differences in emotional characteristics due to early release, such as the harpsichord decreasing in ranking for positive emotional characteristics on sounds with early releases. By correlating timbral features with the listener rankings, we found that decay slope and density of significant harmonics were significant timbral features for many emotional characteristics.