Timbre attributes of saxophone multiphonics: psychophysical and spectral analysis

ERNESTO RIERA, PABLO; MARTIN PROSCIA; MANUEL C. EGUÍA

Huerta Grande

Congreso; Congreso Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias 2012; 2012

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

Timbre is a multidimensional attribute of sound. In many cases is useful to distinguish one musical instrument from other or to categorize the vowels and consonants. In this work we studied the timbre of saxophones multiphonics, a set of sounds that could be created with a saxophone that have the characteristic of having more than one identifiable pitch, instead of standard playing notes. The timbre of this sounds are rather heterogeneous and this is related with the problem of timbre classification and timbre similarity evaluation. For this purpose we implement a pair comparison test for evaluating the similarities within a group of 15 multiphonics. The results were analyzed by multidimensional scaling and showed that the sound are grouped in different classes in accordance to the saxophone execution technique. Finally the psychological dimension that arise with the multidimensional scaling were correlated with physical sound parameters as the spectral content and modulation index.