aCentre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London
bChair of Acoustic and Haptic Engineering, TU Dresden
cInstitut d'Alembert - LAM, Sorbonne Université / CNRS
dComputational acoustic modeling laboratory, CIRMMT, McGill University
Abstract :
Results from a previous study on the perceptual evaluation of violins
that involved playing-based semantic ratings showed that preference
for a violin was strongly associated with its perceived sound richness.
However, both preference and richness ratings varied widely between
individual violinists, likely because musicians conceptualize the same
attribute in different ways. To better understand how richness is
conceptualized by violinists and how it contributes to the perceived
quality of a violin, we analyzed free verbal descriptions collected
during a carefully controlled playing task (involving 16 violinists) and
in an online survey where no sound examples or other contextual
information was present (involving 34 violinists). The analysis was
based on a psycholinguistic method, whereby semantic categories are
inferred from the verbal data itself through syntactic context and
linguistic markers. The main sensory property related to violin sound
richness was expressed through words such as full, round, and dense
versus thin, weak, and small, referring to the perceived number of
partials present in the sound. Another sensory property was
expressed through words such as warm, velvety, and smooth versus
strident, harsh, and tinny, alluding to spectral energy distribution
cues. Haptic cues were also implicated in the conceptualization of
violin sound richness.