A psychophysical investigation of timbre was undertaken with the intent of deriving quantitative results that could be useful in developing a better human interface to control effects processing for expressiveness in music. Multidimensional perceptual scaling analysis was performed for a set of musical timbres. Two listening experiments were performed in order to determine the most salient perceptual attributes. These two experiments provide data enabling
KANSEI engineering for these effects. A commercially available effects processor generated the six stimuli used in these experiments. In the first experiment, listeners were asked to give ratings of the relative difference between two stimuli without regard to any property contributing to that difference. In the second experiment, the listeners were asked to give ratings of each stimulus with respect to a particular property. Dissimilarity ratings of all pair-wise comparisons of the six effects were submitted to INdividual Differences SCALing (INDSCAL) analysis in order to derive a multidimensional perceptual space for the stimuli. Three semantic components were derived using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) of property ratings for the same set of six effects. Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) was used to relate the perceptual dimensions and semantic components, the results of which provide a control structure for a commercially available effects processor. The study revealed a direct mapping between three perceptual dimensions and three semantic component scales, those being labeled as “sharp-dull, ”“diffusecompact, ”and “thick-thin”(in Japanese, surudoi-nibui, hirogotta-kojinmarishita, and usui-atsui).
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