An Investigation of Musical Timbre: Uncovering Salient Semantic Descriptors and Perceptual Dimensions

A study on the verbal attributes of musical timbre was conducted in an effort to identify the most significant semantic descriptors and to quantify the association between prominent timbral aspects and several categorical properties of environmental entities. A verbal attribute magnitude estimation (VAME) type of listening test in which participants were asked to describe 23 musical sounds using 30 Greek adjectives together with verbal terms of their own choice was designed and conducted for this purpose. Factor and Cluster Analysis were performed on the subjective evaluation data in order to shed some light on the relationships between the adjectives that were proposed and to conclude to the number and quality of the salient perceptual dimensions required for the description of this set of sounds.