Correlation between perception and acoustical parameters in five musical genres

Abstract

To investigate the influence of sound effects on the perception of musical genres, excerpts from 150 musical pieces of Rock, Jazz, Classical, Ethnographic and Electronic music were compared. In a listening test subjects were asked to judge them in terms of 12 adjectives related to spaciousness, timbre and semantic attributes. Additionally the pieces were analyzed with three methods. To judge the spaciousness the Interaural Cross Correlation (IACC) was calculated. To estimate the audio effect strength an echodensity was defined as the amount of phase fluctuations. To estimate the density of tonal texture a fractal correlation dimension was used. The musical genres clearly sorted along their IACC values with Rock being most ‘mono’ and Classical music most spatial. The echodensity was about the same for all genres except for electronic music where it was considerably larger. The mean fractal correlation dimensions were about four with all genres pointing to a mean textual density for all genres. In terms of perception, the higher echodensity correlated positively with the adjective “artificial” for Electronic music. Additional findings were made.