Perception of Musical Instrument Sounds

At Aalto, the perception of synthetic string instrument sounds has been studied in formal listening tests

Selected Publications

Publication Short Description
Bank, B., and Lehtonen, H.-M., "Perception of longitudinal components in piano string vibrations,'' Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters, vol. 128, no. 3, pp. EL117-EL123, September 2010.

The audibility of longitudinal components in fortissimo piano tones is investigated with formal listening tests. The results imply that the longitudinal components are audible up to the note C5 (523 Hz), but the subjects considered the phenomenon to be subtle above the note A3 (220 Hz).
M. Karjalainen and H. Järveläinen, "Is inharmonicity perceivable in the acoustic guitar?," Proc. Forum Acusticum, Budapest, Hungary, Aug 29- Sept 2, 2005.

Perception of inharmonicity in the classical acoustic guitar was studied using very realistic test tones obtained by the ZFARMA modeling technique. Trained guitarists participated in the experiment.
H. Järveläinen and M. Karjalainen. "Importance of inharmonicity in the acoustic guitar," Proceedings Int. Computer Music Conf., pp.363-366, Barcelona, Spain, September 5-9, 2005. Perception of inharmonicity in the classical acoustic guitar was studied using very realistic test tones obtained by the ZFARMA modeling technique.

H. Järveläinen, V. Välimäki and T. Verma. "Perception and adjustment of pitch in inharmonic string instrument sounds," Journal of New Music Research, 31(4), pp.311-319, 2003.

 The effect of inharmonicity on pitch was measured at five fundamental frequencies.
H. Järveläinen and M. Karjalainen, "Perception of beating and two-stage decay in dual-polarization string models," Proceedings Int. Symposium on Musical Acoustics ISMA, Mexico City, December 9-13, 2002. Perception of dual-polarization string models was studied, including change detection in beating rate and the decay times of the polarization components.

H. Järveläinen, "Perception-based control of vibrato parameters in string instrument synthesis," Proceedings Int. Computer Music Conf., pp. 287-294, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 16-21, 2002.

 This paper reports listening experiments exploring the perception of vibrato, giving guidelines for the control of vibrato parameters in string instrument synthesis.
H. Järveläinen , V. Välimäki, and M. Karjalainen, "Audibility of the timbral effects of inharmonicity in stringed instrument tones," Acoustics Research Letters Online 2(3), p. 79-84, 2001. This paper describes listening tests that studied the perceptibility of inharmonicity in string instrument sounds. Perception thresholds were measured at four fundamental frequencies for generic synthetic string instrument -like sounds.

H. Järveläinen and T. Tolonen, "Perceptual tolerances for the decaying parameters in string instrument synthesis," J. Audio Eng. Soc., 49(11), 2001.

 The audibility of variation in decay parameters of plucked-string sounds was studied by listneing tests.
H. Järveläinen and V. Välimäki, "Audibility of initial pitch glides in string instrument sounds," Proceedings Int. Computer Music Conf. ICMC01, pp. 282-285, Havana, Cuba, September 17-23, 2001. Perception thresholds for initial pitch glides in string instruments were obtained by listening tests.
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