Relationship between the physical parameters of musical wind instruments and the psychoacoustic attributes of the produced sound

• Main Author: Carral Robles Leon, Sandra
• Published: University of Edinburgh 2005
• Subjects: 780
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.642617

This work attempts to correlate small changes in the physical parameters of a wind instrument with how humans perceive the pitch and timbre of the produced sound, with a view of helping in the design and quality assessment of musical instruments. The perceptual significance of small changes in the sound of a trombone played with mouthpieces of different shapes is investigated by synthesising the sound recordings with additive synthesis, and performing psychoacoustic tests asking people to state whether they can hear a difference or not, using a two alternative forced choice (2AFC) test. The just noticeable difference in the timbre of the trombone is also found. The psychoacoustic parameters of pitch and timbre of a Scottish Border bagpipe chanter and reed sound played with an artificial blowing machine were measured after having stored the reed under different relative humidity conditions. It was found that the pitch and spectral centroid are inversely correlated with the moisture content of the reed, which depends on the relative humidity of the air around it. The physical parameters of stiffness, resonance frequency and damping factor of the reed were measured. These parameters were used to predict the playing frequency and spectrum of the sound that the chanter and reed system would produce using a physical model based on the Harmonic Balance Method.