An Interlanguage Unification of Musical Timbre

Abstract

The current study expands our previous work on interlanguage musical timbre semantics by examining the relationship between semantics and perception of timbre. Following Zacharakis, Pastiadis, and Reiss (2014), a pairwise dissimilarity listening test involving participants from two separate linguistic groups (Greek and English) was conducted. Subsequent multidimensional scaling analysis produced a 3D perceptual timbre space for each language. The comparison between perceptual spaces suggested that timbre perception is unaffected by native language. Additionally, comparisons between semantic and perceptual spaces revealed substantial similarities which suggest that verbal descriptions can convey a considerable amount of perceptual information. The previously determined semantic labels “auditory texture” and “luminance” featured the highest associations with perceptual dimensions for both languages. “Auditory mass” failed to show any strong correlations. Acoustic analysis identified energy distribution of harmonic partials, spectral detail, temporal/spectrotemporal characteristics and the fundamental frequency as the most salient acoustic correlates of perceptual dimensions.