Characterizing prototypical musical instrument timbres with Timbre Trait Profiles

Abstract

This paper offers a series of characterizations of prototypical musical timbres, called Timbre Trait Profiles, for 34 musical instruments common in Western orchestras and wind ensembles. These profiles represent the results of a study in which 243 musician participants imagined the sounds of various instruments and used the 20-dimensional model of musical instrument timbre qualia proposed by Reymore and Huron (2020) to rate their auditory image of each instrument. The rating means are visualized through radar plots, which provide timbral-linguistic thumbprints, and are summarized through snapshot profiles, which catalog the six highest- and three lowest-rated descriptors. The Euclidean distances among instruments offer a quantitative operationalization of semantic distances; these distances are illustrated through hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling. Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to analyze the latent structure of the rating data. Finally, results are used to assess Reymore and Huron’s 20-dimensional timbre qualia model, suggesting that the model is highly reliable. It is anticipated that the Timbre Trait Profiles can be applied in future perceptual/cognitive research on timbre and orchestration, in music theoretical analysis for both close readings and corpus studies, and in orchestration pedagogy.