An Investigation into How Reverberation Effects the Space of Instrument Emotional Characteristics

Abstract

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 ...

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

“…We selected the same categories we have used in previous studies [37,[44][45][46][47][48]. Composers often use these terms in tempo and expression markings in their scores.…”

The effects of audio processing on the perceived emotional characteristics of musical instrument sounds

“…I work has shown that different musical instruments have distinct emotional characteristics [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,32], and that reverberation can greatly change these characteristics [35,36,38,78,51,81]. And while these emotional characteristics can be greatly changed with reverberation, the results in this experiment and in Experiment 3 (see Section 4.3) have shown that they are changed uniformly in about the same way for different instruments.…”

“…In addition to the eight emotional categories we tested (e.g., Comic, Happy, Heroic, Mysterious, Romantic, Sad, Scary, and Shy) in the parametric reverberation test, for this study we picked two extra emotional categories, namely Angry and Calm. These categories were actually used in our previous research on musical instruments and parametric reverberation [21,20,22,19,23,24,32,74,51,75,76,33,38,77,78,79].…”

“…Some choices of emotional characteristics are fairly universal and occur in many previous studies roughly corresponding to the four quadrants of the Valence-Arousal plane (e.g., Happy, Sad, Scary/Fear/Angry, Tender/Calm/Romantic), but there are lots of variations beyond that [64]. For this study, we used the same categories that we used in our previous research on musical instruments and reverberation [21,20,22,19,23,24,32,75,33,74,76,38,77,78,79,51].…”