The Effects of Audio Processings on the Perceived Emotional Characteristics of Musical Instrument Sounds

PhD Thesis Proposal Defence


Title: "The Effects of Audio Processings on the Perceived Emotional
Characteristics of Musical Instrument Sounds"

by

Mr. Ron Ka Chun MO


Abstract:

Previous research has shown that musical instruments have distinctive 
emotional characteristics, and that these characteristics can be 
significantly changed with reverberation. However, do these changes in 
character are relatively uniform or instrument-dependent? Also, do the 
parametric reverberation results apply to real concert hall reverberation 
as well?

To answer those questions, we conducted two listening tests to compare 
various sustained instrument tones with different settings for both simple 
parametric reverberation and convolution reverberation over different 
emotional characteristics. For parametric reverberation, our results 
indicate that the underlying instrument space does not change much with 
reverberation in terms of emotional characteristics. The instruments we 
tested can also be clustered into two distinct groups, where the saxophone 
is an outlier. For convolution reverberation, we picked five hall impulse 
responses and underwent a similar experiment. We found that convolution 
reverberation had more pronounced effects on the emotional characteristics 
compared to parametric reverberation, yet there was a strong agreement in 
the results of parametric and convolution reverberations. Therefore, 
reverberation time has a remarkably consistent effect on the emotional 
characteristics regardless of which reverberation was used. We will also 
discuss some possible future work based on the results we found in those 
two tests mentioned above.


Date:			Monday, 20 March 2017

Time:                  	4:00pm - 6:00pm

Venue:                  Room 4475
                         (lifts 25/26)

Committee Members:	Prof. Andrew Horner (Supervisor)
  			Dr. Xiaojuan Ma (Chairperson)
  			Dr. Raymond Wong
 			Prof. Richard So (IELM)


**** ALL are Welcome ****