Mihir Sarkar - mihir@media.mit.edu
Barry Vercoe - bv@media.mit.edu
The Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
Cyril Lan - cyrillan@mit.edu
Joseph Diaz - jdiaz@mit.edu
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
Popular version of paper 4aMU2
Presented Thursday morning, May 21, 2009
157th ASA Meeting, Portland, OR
Do you remember asking your bass player -- if you ever played in a band -- to make his sound fatter, or even describing your LP albums as warmer than their CD version? In fact, musicians and listeners often describe sound with words borrowed from a variety of domains, including vision (bright), touch (rough), and material properties (metallic). However, in our experience with musicians we noticed that brass players, for instance, used a specific vocabulary suited to their instrument, and different from, say, singers or violinists. We therefore postulated that the words used to describe sound were dependent on a persons musical, and possibly cultural, background.
To verify our hypothesis, we designed and administered an online survey in which participants were asked to describe sounds that were presented to them by either selecting words from a list, describing them with their own words, or comparing two sounds (this sound is sharper than that one). We used 64 sound files that were gathered from Freesound, a user-generated online sound database, and combined them randomly with a list of 62 words that we collected from a prior survey and literature searches. 844 subjects from various countries and musical backgrounds took our survey. Each person was assigned to one or more musical categories (strings, woodwinds, electronic, percussion, and brass), and the results were compared across categories. Statistical measures were employed to determine the relationship between musical background and survey responses.
Surprisingly, our study indicated that people tend to use similar words to describe a particular sound. We therefore concluded that the description of musical sounds is a universal skill that is not influenced by musical training and preference. This sheds a different light on how our brain processes sound quality or timbre, and could lead to a self-reflection tool in the education of musicians and sound engineers. Furthermore, by analyzing our survey responses to identify the physical characteristics of sound that correspond to each word, we are planning to build a synthesizer that will be able to modify a sound from a verbal description that is intuitive to the user rather than from numerical parameters: for example, we could tell the synthesizer to make this bass fatter and the sound track would be automatically made fatter.
References:
http://web.media.mit.edu/~mihir/projects/sound_design.html
http://www.freesound.org/