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 ...

The piano is an instrument extensively used in classical, jazz, and pop music since its broad pitch range and ample dynamic levels allow the instrument to become self-contained and versatile for various kinds of music. We conducted listening tests to compare the effects of pitch and dynamics on the emotional characteristics of isolated one-second piano sounds. Listeners compared the sounds pairwise over ten emotion categories. The results showed that all ten emotional categories were significantly affected by pitch and nine of them by dynamics. In particular, the emotional characteristics Happy, Romantic, Comic, Calm, Mysterious, and Shy generally increased with pitch but sometimes decreased at the highest pitches. The characteristics Heroic, Angry, and Sad generally decreased with pitch. Scary was strong in the extreme low and high registers. In terms of dynamics, the results showed that the characteristics Heroic, Comic, Angry, and Scary were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. Surprisingly, Happy was not affected by dynamics. These results help quantify the emotional characteristics of piano sounds.

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.

Musical instrument sounds have distinct timbral and emotional characteristics, and when audio processes are applied to them their timbral and emotional characteristics are changed. This paper investigates the effects of MP3 compression on the emotional characteristics of eight sustained instrument sounds using a listening test. We compared the compressed sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories at several bit rates. The results showed that MP3 compression strengthened neutral and negative emotional characteristics such as Mysterious, Shy, Scary, and Sad; and weakened positive emotional characteristics such as Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic, and Calm. Interestingly, Angry was relatively unaffected by MP3 compression. Probably, the background "growl" artifacts added by MP3 compression decreased positive emotional characteristics and increased negative characteristics such as Mysterious and Scary. For instruments, MP3 compression effected some instruments more and others less. The trumpet was the most effected and the horn by far the least.

Previous research has shown that musical instruments have distinctive emotional characteristics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and that these characteristics can be significantly changed with reverberation [10][11][12][13]. This paper considers whether these changes in character are relatively uniform or instrument-dependent. We compared eight sustained instrument tones with different amounts and lengths of simple parametric reverberation over eight emotional characteristics. The results show a remarkable consistency in listener rankings of the instruments for each of the different types of reverberation, with strong correlations ranging from 90 to 95%. These results indicate that the underlying instrument space does not change much with reverberation in terms of emotional characteristics, and that each instrument has a particular footprint of emotional characteristics. Among the tones we tested, the instruments cluster into two fairly distinctive groups: those where the positive energetic emotional characteristics are strong (e.g., oboe, trumpet, violin) and those where the low-arousal characteristics are strong (e.g., bassoon, clarinet, flute, horn). The saxophone is an outlier and is somewhat strong for most emotional characteristics. In terms of applications, the relatively consistent rankings of emotional characteristics between the instruments certainly helps each instrument retain its identity in different reverberation environments and suggests possible future work in instrument identification. INTRODUCTIONResearchers have considered various relationships between timbre and music emotion [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] and, in particular, have found that dfferent instruments have different timbral and emotional characteristics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. By changing the pitch, dynamics, and other aspects of the performance, the timbre and emotional characteristics also change [9,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. These characteristics are further modified by the performance environment-by the amount and length of reverberation in the space [10,11,37,38], which smears the temporal and spectral envelopes and changes the emotional character of the sound. The same idea holds when artificial reverberation is added as a post-process. For example, concert hall reverberation can bring out emotional characteristics such as Mysterious or Heroic from the original studio recording, or the recording engineer and musicians might use a dry sound to emphasize its Comic character [12].While reverberation can strengthen or deemphasize particular emotional characteristics, does it change the underlying instrument space? In other words, when reverberation changes the emotional characteristics of the instruments, does it change them uniformly or some instruments more than others? If we compare the instruments in terms of the emotional characteristic Heroic, for example, and rank them, is the ranking about the same for different amounts and lengths of reverberation? Or, does a bright instrument such as ...