A confirmatory approach of the Luminance-Texture-Mass model for musical timbre semantics

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 analysed 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 with the same stimuli. The results showed that the selected six semantic scales are adequately representing the LTM model and are fair at predicting the configurations of the sounds that result from pairwise dissimilarity ratings.