Is Vivaldi smooth and takete? Non-verbal sensory scales for describing music qualities

Abstract

Studies on the perception of music qualities (such as induced or perceived emotions, performance styles, or timbre nuances) make a large use of verbal descriptors. Although many authors noted that particular music qualities can hardly be described by means of verbal labels, few studies have tried alternatives. This paper aims at exploring the use of non-verbal sensory scales, in order to represent different perceived qualities in Western classical music. Musically trained and untrained listeners were required to listen to six musical excerpts in major key and to evaluate them from a sensorial and semantic point of view (Experiment 1). The same design (Experiment 2) was conducted using musically trained and untrained listeners who were required to listen to six musical excerpts in minor key. The overall findings indicate that subjects’ ratings on non-verbal sensory scales are consistent throughout and the results support the hypothesis that sensory scales can convey some specific sensations that cannot be described verbally, offering interesting insights to deepen our knowledge on the relationship between music and other sensorial experiences. Such research can foster interesting applications in the field of music information retrieval and timbre spaces explorations together with experiments applied to different musical cultures and contexts

Assessing the Role of Emotional Mediation in Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences Involving Musical Stimuli

“…The colour patches included: "red, orange, yellow, chartreuse, green, cyan and blue and purple at four different lightness-saturation levels (saturated, light, muted, and dark), plus three greys, white, and black." (Palmer et al, 2013, p. 8837; see also Murari et al, 2014).…”

“…Perhaps this suggests that it is, in some sense, the dominant perceptual/conceptual sonic dimension, typically corresponding with elevation (Deroy et al, 2018;Spence, 2019a). At the same time, however, it should be remembered that pitch also has a number of other connotations too: e.g., with size (Evans and Treisman, 2010;Gallace and Spence, 2006;, angularity ; see also Murari et al, 2015), lightness (Hubbard, 1996;Marks, 1974Marks, , 1975Marks, , 1987Wicker, 1968;cf. Simpson et al, 1956), and brightness/lightness (Marks, 1987;Saysani, 2019;Walker, 2012; see Spence, 2011Spence, , 2018.…”

Naturally Biased Associations Between Music and Poetry

“…As regards cross-modal associations in the adult general population involving musical stimuli, studies have been conducted in relation to visual shape (Ku¨ssner, 2013a(Ku¨ssner, , 2013bTan & Kelly, 2004) imagery (Jakubowski, Farrugia, Halpern, Sankarpandi and Stewart, 2015;Walker, 1981), emotions (Collier & Hub, 2001;Crowder, 1985;Murari et al, 2015;Palmer & Schloss, 2010;Palmer, Schloss, Xu, & Prado-Leo´n, 2013;Ward, Huckstep, & Tsakanikos, 2006), taste (Mesz, Trevisano, & Sigman, 2011), taste and flavors (Crisinel & Spence, 2010), odors (Belkin, Martin, Kemp, & Gilbert, 1997), and paintings (Albertazzi et al, 2015). In general, these studies shed light on the role played by pitch and musical modes (minor and major) in the emotional connotations attributed by subjects to the musical selections.…”

“…The methods used in experiments vary from Osgood semantic differential (see Bigand, Vieillard, Madurell, Marozeau and Dacquet, 2005;Osgood, 1956), through psychophysical methods (such as reaction times, implicit association test, etc. ), to methods of nonverbal sensory scales (Murari et al, 2015), magnetic resonance imaging scanning, and methods of direct associations between stimuli based on subjective judgments in first person account (Albertazzi et al, 2015).…”

Verbal and Cross-Modal Ratings of Music: Validation and Application of an Icon-Based Rating Scale

“…For example, in one experiment, Murari et al. (2014) found that six excerpts of music could be reliably connected to particular shapes (smooth or jagged), and colour associations were also fairly consistent, with an excerpt from the Adagio from Mozart’s piano concerto K 488 regularly reported as the colour blue, and less regularly reported using the word “blue.” These findings have been replicated (Murari, Rodà, Da Pos, et al., 2015) and have been found to produce similar results when the different modalities are represented by purely visual analogues in the form of icon pairs (Murari, Schubert, Rodà, Da Pos, & De Poli, 2017), for example, images of hard objects formed into one icon and images of soft objects formed into another icon for the “hard–soft” icon scale. The icon based nonverbal scale had the advantage of allowing a wider range and larger number of modes to be represented (e.g., instead of just warm and cold, an icon could represent heat with a fire icon and cold with an image of a blizzard, things that are difficult to realise safely and inexpensively in a laboratory).…”