Categorization and lexicon in verbal descriptions of violin quality by performers

Abstract

This work aimed to explore how violin quality is conceptualized as reflected in spontaneous verbal descriptions by experienced performers collected while playing in a perceptual evaluation experiment. Participants performed a preference ranking task and justified their perceptions in a free verbalization task. Using the constant comparison analysis from grounded theory, a concept map was developed, which can be useful for future studies aimed at assessing violin qualities. A psycholinguistic analysis of the quality-descriptive lexicon used by violinists further revealed a variety of linguistic devices referring to either the sound of a violin or to the violin itself as the cognitive objects. Adjectives for the description of sound characteristics are largely borrowed from four semantic fields related to texture-temperature (smooth vs. rough), action-presence (resonant vs. muted), size-volume (deep vs. flat), and light (dark vs. bright). These semantic fields indicate what type of dimensions may explain the perception of violin timbre, contributing to the area of violin acoustics research as well as to the broader area of timbre research. Some acoustical interpretations are discussed in the context of finding correlations between measurable vibrational properties of a violin and its perceived quality.