The Effects of Convolution Reverberation on the Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instrument Sounds

Abstract

Previous work has shown that the emotional characteristics of musical instrument sounds are significantly changed with parametric reverberation. But do the parametric reverberation results also apply to real concert hall reverberation? This article considers the effects of reverberation time on the emotional characteristics of instrument sounds with convolution reverberation. We compared eight musical instruments and ten emotional characteristics over five hall impulse responses ranging from the one-second Royal National Theatre to the five-second King's College Chapel. The results showed that convolution reverberation had more pronounced effects on emotional characteristics compared with parametric reverberation. This makes sense, since convolution reverberation is often regarded as warmer, more natural, and smoother than parametric reverberation. The latter is often regarded as blander by comparison. Halls with shorter reverberation times emphasized the emotional characteristics Angry and Comic, whereas medium reverberation times emphasized the characteristics Happy, Heroic, and Shy, and longer reverberation times emphasized the characteristics Calm, Mysterious, Romantic, Sad, and Scary. Although the results were more pronounced for convolution reverberation compared with parametric reverberation, there was also a striking agreement in their results, and the correlation coefficient between them was 0.654 over all emotional characteristics. This strong correlation indicates that reverberation time has a remarkably consistent effect on the emotional characteristics regardless of whether using convolution or parametric reverberation—a reflection of their deep underlying functional similarities despite their fundamentally different implementations.