Words that describe timbre: a study of auditory perception through language

by Mihir Sarkar, Barry Vercoe, and Yang Yang
Language and Music as Cognitive Systems Conference (LMCS-2007), Cambridge, UK, May 11-13, 2007.

Musicians and music-lovers often use non-technical words to describe the quality of the sounds they create or hear. In particular, terminology that is sensory in nature (e.g. bright, warm, smooth) is commonly employed. Our project investigates the relationship between auditory perception and language in this context. We are interested in finding out whether people use a common vocabulary to describe sounds, or if their choice of words is related to their musical or cultural background. We are also examining how these words correlate with timbral features. To this end we deployed a survey, which asked people to assign words to the sounds they heard. 40 sounds were presented randomly to each user from a list of 200 that were collected from the Freesound online database. After listening to each sound, users could enter free text as well as rate a list of words on a scale ranging from “not applicable” to “high”. 40 words were carefully selected from previous studies and from the labels assigned by contributors to the Freesound database. Out of those, 12 words were randomly presented through each survey session. Chosen words included material properties (e.g. wood, strings), adjectives from sensory modalities other than hearing (e.g. sharp, sweet), and subjective impressions (e.g. pleasant, noisy). Our preliminary study indicates that people tend to assign similar words to certain types of sounds, and thus suggests a fairly universal mapping between words and timbre. Moreover these words strongly correlate with audio features both in the frequency domain (i.e. spectral content) and in the time domain (i.e. amplitude envelope shape). Results of this study will be used to develop a sound synthesis engine and audio post-processing unit that can alter the sonic quality of an audio input based on a verbal description of the user’s intuitive expectation rather than technical parameters.

Poster (PDF): 34 in × 44 in (804KB)