428 research outputs found

    Detection of keyboard vibrations and effects on perceived piano quality

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    Two experiments were conducted on an upright and a grand piano, both either producing string vibrations or conversely being silent after the initial keypress, while pianists were listening to the feedback from a synthesizer through insulating headphones. In a quality experiment, participants unaware of the silent mode were asked to play freely and then rate the instrument according to a set of attributes and general preference. Participants preferred the vibrating over the silent setup, and preference ratings were associated to auditory attributes of richness and naturalness in the low and middle ranges. Another experiment on the same setup measured the detection of vibrations at the keyboard, while pianists played notes and chords of varying dynamics and duration. Sensitivity to string vibrations was highest in the lowest register and gradually decreased up to note D5. After the percussive transient, the tactile stimuli exhibited spectral peaks of acceleration whose perceptibility was demonstrated by tests conducted in active touch conditions. The two experiments confirm that piano performers perceive vibratory cues of strings mediated by spectral and spatial summations occurring in the Pacinian system in their fingertips, and suggest that such cues play a role in the evaluation of quality of the musical instrument

    Detection of keyboard vibrations and effects on perceived piano quality

    Get PDF
    Two experiments were conducted on an upright and a grand piano, both either producing string vibrations or conversely being silent after the initial keypress, while pianists were listening to the feedback from a synthesizer through insulating headphones. In a quality experiment, participants unaware of the silent mode were asked to play freely and then rate the instrument according to a set of attributes and general preference. Participants preferred the vibrating over the silent setup, and preference ratings were associated to auditory attributes of richness and naturalness in the low and middle ranges. Another experiment on the same setup measured the detection of vibrations at the keyboard, while pianists played notes and chords of varying dynamics and duration. Sensitivity to string vibrations was highest in the lowest register and gradually decreased up to note D5. After the percussive transient, the tactile stimuli exhibited spectral peaks of acceleration whose perceptibility was demonstrated by tests conducted in active touch conditions. The two experiments confirm that piano performers perceive vibratory cues of strings mediated by spectral and spatial summations occurring in the Pacinian system in their fingertips, and suggest that such cues play a role in the evaluation of quality of the musical instrument

    On the influence of non-linear phenomena on perceived interactions in percussive instruments

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    International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that perceived impact strength is strongly influenced by the non-linear behavior produced by large deformations in percussive instruments. A sound corpus is first generated from a physical model that simulates non-linear vibrations of a thin plate. The e↔ect of non-linear phenomena on the perceived strength is further quantified through a listening test. The aim of this study is to improve the expressive potential of synthesizers of percussive sounds through the development of signal transformation models. Future work will focus on the modeling of sound morphologies that correspond to non-linear behavior and the development of a transparent control strategy

    The sound of walking

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    Car door closure sounds: characterization of perceptual properties through analysis-synthesis approach

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    International audienceThe aim of this study is to identify perceptually pertinent parameters for the evaluation of car door closure sounds. For this purpose, perceptual properties of recorded sounds were first evaluated by sensory metrology. Then, an analysis-synthesis approach was chosen in order to identify perceptually pertinent signal parameters. The analysis part of this process first consisted in decomposing the sound in several independent impact sources using the Empirical Modal Decomposition method. Each impact is then modeled by a set of gains and damping factors in each critical band (ERB). These parameters were further used to synthesize sounds related to various aspects of the door closure sound with a real-time tool. This approach allowed for the generation of realistic, synthesized car door closure sounds that preserve perceptual properties with a reduced number of signal parameters. Listening tests finally allowed for the observation of the influence of the main signal parameters on the perceptual properties of such action-related impact sounds

    Make That Sound More 'Metallic': Towards a Perceptually Relevant Control of the Timbre of Synthesizer Sounds Using a Variational Autoencoder

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    In this article, we propose a new method of sound transformation based on control parameters that are intuitive and relevant for musicians. This method uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) model that is first trained in an unsupervised manner on a large dataset of synthesizer sounds. Then, a perceptual regularization term is added to the loss function to be optimized, and a supervised fine-tuning of the model is carried out using a small subset of perceptually labeled sounds. The labels were obtained from a perceptual test of Verbal Attribute Magnitude Estimation in which listeners rated this training sound dataset along eight perceptual dimensions (French equivalents of 'metallic, warm, breathy, vibrating, percussive, resonating, evolving, aggressive'). These dimensions were identified as relevant for the description of synthesizer sounds in a first Free Verbalization test. The resulting VAE model was evaluated by objective reconstruction measures and a perceptual test. Both showed that the model was able, to a certain extent, to capture the acoustic properties of most of the perceptual dimensions and to transform sound timbre along at least two of them ('aggressive' and 'vibrating') in a perceptually relevant manner. Moreover, it was able to generalize to unseen samples even though a small set of labeled sounds was used

    Timbre from Sound Synthesis and High-level Control Perspectives

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    International audienceExploring the many surprising facets of timbre through sound manipulations has been a common practice among composers and instrument makers of all times. The digital era radically changed the approach to sounds thanks to the unlimited possibilities offered by computers that made it possible to investigate sounds without physical constraints. In this chapter we describe investigations on timbre based on the analysis by synthesis approach that consists in using digital synthesis algorithms to reproduce sounds and further modify the parameters of the algorithms to investigate their perceptual relevance. In the first part of the chapter timbre is investigated in a musical context. An examination of the sound quality of different wood species for xylophone making is first presented. Then the influence of instrumental control on timbre is described in the case of clarinet and cello performances. In the second part of the chapter, we mainly focus on the identification of sound morphologies, so called invariant sound structures responsible for the evocations induced by environmental sounds by relating basic signal descriptors and timbre descriptors to evocations in the case of car door noises, motor noises, solid objects, and their interactions
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