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Musically induced tension has been the subject of thorough study in the music cognition literature but its relationship with timbre is still poorly investigated. This study examines how the dynamic variation of a tone’s inharmonicity may affect a number of auditory qualities, namely brightness, roughness and mass along with felt tension under different acoustical conditions (i.e., F0, spectral shape and type of inharmonicity). Fifty-six musically trained participants gave real-time continuous ratings on eight time-varying stimuli upon the aforementioned qualities. Static ratings over the initial purely harmonic parts of the stimuli were also obtained by a subgroup of the listening panel. The fundamental frequency exhibits the strongest influence on the responses of the four qualities, followed by the type of inharmonicity and the spectral shape to a lesser degree. The profile patterns of mass and brightness proved to be strong predictors for tension profile patterns while the roughness profile magnitudes show a significant main effect on the magnitude of tension profiles. Overall, these results demonstrate that time-varying inharmonicity affects continuous responses on both timbral semantics and tension, while indicating that felt tension may be influenced by underlying timbral qualities in a dynamic context.

CHAMELEON is a computational melodic harmonization assistant. It can harmonize a given melody according to a number of independent harmonic idioms or blends between idioms based on principles of conceptual blending theory. Thus, the system is capable of offering a wealth of possible solutions and viewpoints for melodic harmonization. This study investigates how human creativity may be influenced by the use of CHAMELEON in a melodic harmonization task. Professional and novice music composers participated in an experiment where they were asked to harmonize two similar melodies under two different conditions: one with and one without computational support. A control group harmonized both melodies without computational assistance. The influence of the system was examined both behaviorally, by comparing metrics of user-experience, and in terms of the properties of the artifacts (i.e., pitch class distribution and number of chord types characterizing each harmonization) that were created between the two experimental conditions. Results suggest that appreciation of the system was expertise-dependent (i.e., novices appreciated the computational support more than professionals). At the same time, users seemed to adopt more explorative strategies as a result of interaction with CHAMELEON based on the fact that the harmonizations created this way were more complex, diverse, and unexpected in comparison to the ones of the control group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the CHAMELEON melodic harmonisation assistant that utilises the principles of conceptual blending theory as a means for the invention of hybrid or novel harmonic idioms and an empirical evaluation of a number of computer-generated melodic harmonisation blends. Melodies originating from various idioms were harmonised either according to the harmonic rules of the original idiom, according to the rules of a different idiom (melody-harmony blends), or by blending idioms, modes and transported versions of the same idiom (harmony-harmony blends). In two similar experimental set ups, the task of the listeners was to i) perform idiom, mode or type of chromaticism classification, ii) report their preference, and iii) rate the degree of expectancy characterising each harmonisation. The results show that harmonic blending (either melody-harmony or harmony-harmony) influences the identification of idiom, mode and type of chromaticism. This suggests that the harmonic blending system has indeed succeeded in producing perceivable blends under various conditions that were unexpected and also equally preferred compared to non-blends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a listening experiment designed to further examine the previously proposed luminance-texture-mass (LTM) model for timbral semantics. Thirty-two musically trained listeners rated twenty-four instrument tones on six predefined semantic scales, namely, brilliance, depth, roundness, warmth, fullness, and richness. The selection of this limited set of descriptors was based on previous exploratory work. These six semantic scales were analyzed through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to produce two different timbre spaces. These timbre spaces were subsequently compared for configurational and dimensional similarity with the LTM semantic space and the direct MDS perceptual space obtained from the same stimuli. The results showed that the six selected semantic scales are adequately representing the LTM model and are fair at predicting the configurations of the sounds that result from pairwise dissimilarity ratings. However, our analysis indicates that the enhancement of the LTM model with a term related to percussiveness might constitute a valuable extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]