Acoustic and musical features of emotional response to orchestral gestures

Abstract

Recent empirical research indicates the impact of prominent changes in instrumentation on the listening experience: several studies suggest that timbral changes evoke music-induced emotions. However, orchestration remains an underdeveloped area of music theory. A model of orchestral gestures defined by changes in instrumentation in terms of time course (gradual or sudden) and direction (addition or reduction) is presented. An exploratory behavioral study that tested the perceptual relevance of orchestral gestures on listeners’ continuous ratings of emotional intensity was conducted. We demonstrate a new type of visualization that illustrates the relative textural density of each instrument family over time combined with other time-varying parameters extracted from the signal (loudness, spectral centroid, tempo, and roughness) and calculated from the score (instrumental texture, melodic range, and attack density). In addition to quantitative and qualitative comparison of similar orchestral gestures across ...