Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Saitis, Charalampos
• Weinzierl, Stefan

Titel

Concepts of timbre emerging from musician linguistic expressions

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017-05, Vol.141 (5), p.3799-3799

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

AIP Scitation Journals Complete

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The metaphorical nature of the lexicon used by musicians to describe timbral qualities of instruments shows that they are not familiar with describing sound as a sensory experience in an acoustical terminology and share little knowledge about the perceptual dimensions of sound. Instead, they conceptualize and communicate sound qualities through different sensory domains, for instance, a sound felt, seen, or tasting as “velvety.” These metaphorical linguistic structures are central to the process of conceptualizing timbre by allowing the musician to communicate subtle acoustic variations in terms of other, more commonly shared sensory experiences. Their psycholinguistic analysis can be considered as one way to study the underlying cognitive representations empirically. An online listening test using short instrumental solo excerpts from recorded music was designed to obtain a rich corpus of free-format verbal descriptions of violin, clarinet, piano, and guitar timbre from instrumentalists describing their own as well as other instruments. Through linguistic analysis, associated with psychological theories of perception and sensory categorization, the emerging instrument-dependent and -independent conceptual structures are extracted as a first step in translating the semantics of musician expressions into perceptually meaningful descriptors of sound quality.