The Emotional Characteristics of Sustaining Musical Instruments with Different Pitch and Dynamics

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "The Emotional Characteristics of Sustaining Musical Instruments 
with Different Pitch and Dynamics"

by

Miss Hiu Ting CHAN


Abstract:

Recent research has shown that different musical instrument sounds have 
strong emotional characteristics. It has also shown how these emotional 
characteristics change with different pitch and dynamics for the piano and 
bowed strings. This work differentiates the distinctive emotional 
characters of the section string and brass instruments, and investigate 
how pitch and dynamics influence their characters. We conducted listening 
tests where listeners compared the instrument sounds pairwise over ten 
emotional categories within the section string and brass family 
respectively. For both the section string and brass instruments, the 
emotional characteristic Heroic, Romantic, and Comic generally increased 
with pitch in an arching shape that peaked at C5 and decreased at the 
highest pitches. Scary was somewhat U-shaped and especially strong in the 
extreme high register. Sad decreased with pitch. For the section strings, 
Happy and Calm is also increased with pitch in an arching shape that 
peaked at C5. Angry decreased with pitch. For the brass, Happy increased 
with pitch. Calm and shy were also in arching shape but peaked at C3. 
Angry was U-shaped and especially strong the extreme high register. In 
terms of dynamics, the results showed that Heroic, Comic, Angry, and Scary 
were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Shy, and Sad were 
stronger for soft notes for both the section strings and brass. Moreover, 
the results showed that when listeners compared different instruments on 
notes of the same pitch and dynamic level, they often used the feature 
Spectral Incoherence to differentiate the emotional characteristics. These 
results help quantify our understanding of the relative emotional 
characteristics of the brass and section string instruments. They help 
orchestrators and composers make the jump from knowing a particular pitch 
is technically possible on an instrument, to understanding how its pitch 
register shapes its emotional character.


Date:			Thursday, 21 November 2019

Time:                  	2:00pm - 4:00pm

Venue:                  CYTG001
 			CYT Building
                         lifts 35/36

Committee Members:	Prof. Andrew Horner (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Raymond Wong (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma
 			Dr. David Rossiter


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