TY - GEN
T1 - The emotional characteristics of brass musical instruments with different pitch and dynamics
AU - Chan, Hiu Ting
AU - Mo, Ronald
AU - Keyes, Christopher
AU - Horner, Andrew
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 First author et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
PY - 2019/9/1
Y1 - 2019/9/1
N2 - 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 brass instruments, and investigate how pitch and dynamics influence their characters. We conducted listening tests where listeners compared the brass instrument sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories. The emotional characteristics Happy increased with pitch. Heroic, Romantic, and Comic generally increased with pitch in an arching shape that peaked at C5 and decreased at the highest pitches. Calm, Mysterious, and Shy are also in arching shape but peaked at C3. Angry and Scary was somewhat U-shaped and especially strong in the extreme high register. Sad decreased with pitch. In terms of dynamics, the results showed that Heroic, Comic, Angry, and Scary were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. These results help orchestra-tors 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.
AB - 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 brass instruments, and investigate how pitch and dynamics influence their characters. We conducted listening tests where listeners compared the brass instrument sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories. The emotional characteristics Happy increased with pitch. Heroic, Romantic, and Comic generally increased with pitch in an arching shape that peaked at C5 and decreased at the highest pitches. Calm, Mysterious, and Shy are also in arching shape but peaked at C3. Angry and Scary was somewhat U-shaped and especially strong in the extreme high register. Sad decreased with pitch. In terms of dynamics, the results showed that Heroic, Comic, Angry, and Scary were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. These results help orchestra-tors 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107056008&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:85107056008
T3 - International Computer Music Conference
SP - 371
EP - 376
BT - Proceedings of the 2019 International Computer Music Conference, ICMC-NYCEMF 2019
PB - International Computer Music Association
T2 - 45th International Computer Music Conference, ICMC 2019 and International Computer Music Conference New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, NYCEMF 2019
Y2 - 16 June 2019 through 23 June 2019
ER -