The Emotional Characteristics of Piano Sounds with Different Pitch and Dynamics

Abstract

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.

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

“…2 show some remarkable similarities to the piano results in Chau et al [37]. But since bowed string instruments have a continuous tone while the piano does not, there exist expectable differences.…”

“…Most relevant to the current study, we recently studied how the piano's emotional characteristics changed with pitch and dynamics from C1 to C8 over piano, mezzo, and forte dynamic levels [36,37]. In that study we found that the emotional characteristics Happy, Romantic, Comic, Calm, Mysterious, and Shy generally increased in pitch in an arching shape that decreased at the highest pitches.…”

“…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.…”

An Analysis of Low-Arousal Piano Music Ratings to Uncover What Makes Calm and Sad Music So Difficult to Distinguish in Music Emotion Recognition

“…Each of us tried to describe the excerpt in a single one-word adjective, and the 14 words we used most frequently were selected as the 14 categories. It turns out that about half of the 14 words were used in our previous related studies [79][80][81][82][83][84][85][86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96] and most of the others were used in studies by other researchers [9,20,21,35,47]. All the categories included in the 4-quadrant model in Figure 1 appear in Figure 4 except Angry.…”

The emotional characteristics of section string instruments with different pitch and dynamics

“…Music emotion research has flourished in recent years. In particular, various recent studies have found that different musical instruments have strong and different emotional characteristics [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]20,21]. The vast majority of these studies have focused on a single common pitch, usually a note just above middle C so that as many treble and bass clef instruments can be compared against one another as possible.…”