Effect of room acoustics on timbral brightness of clarinet tones: Experimental investigation with two binaural room impulse responses

Abstract

This study is aimed at investigating how room acoustics affect the timbral brightness of clarinet tones. For semi-anechoic stimuli, nine natural clarinet tones produced at three different dynamic levels and three different notes were used. Reverberant stimuli were generated by convolving each semi-anechoic tone with two different binaural room impulse responses. The stimuli were presented dichotically over headphones to the fifteen participants at equal loudness. The scale values of timbral brightness for each stimulus at equal notes were obtained through Scheffe's paired-comparison test. The results showed that timbral brightness was significantly varied depending on room acoustic conditions. The results also showed that the spectral centroid of tones produced at equal dynamic levels and equal notes was varied depending on room acoustic conditions. The variation range was equivalent to 48–52% of the overall range of that caused by varying both room acoustic conditions and dynamic levels at each note. Timbral brightness was found to linearly increase with the increase in the spectral centroid, irrespective of room acoustics. The slope of timbral brightness corresponding to the spectral centroid was about 1.5–1.6 times steeper for the reverberant tones than for the semi-anechoic tones.