Acoustic quality of musical instruments and categorization

Abstract

The qualitative evaluation of high vintage musical instruments gives rise to several theoretical as well as technical questions. Depending on the experts, either instrument makers trained in various technologies or variously skilled and styled interpreters, the judgments rely on different criteria, regarding the object itself, its manipulations, as well as acoustic or aesthetic properties of the sounds it produces. Various experiments were run with classical guitars (Montchalin, 1993), harpsichords (Guyot, Castellengo, and Dumoulin, 1997), and violin bows (Saint-Loubry and Besnainou, 1997). The judgments were processed in free categorization tasks of musical (listened or performed) sequences, followed by verbal comments on the partitions realized. The analysis of the psychological judgments of similarity and difference, and the linguistic processing of the verbal comments, led to the identification of the relevance of various perceptual modalities (not only acoustic but also kinaesthetic, haptic, and even visual) as well as symbolic associations constructed through experience and training. Physical correlates of the psychologically relevant parameters were transformed by sound synthesis. These experiments allow further theoretical and practical conclusions.