A Comparison of Approaches to Timbre Descriptors in Music Information Retrieval and Music Psychology

A curious divide characterizes the usage of audio descriptors for timbre research in music information research (MIR) and music psychology. While MIR uses a multitude of audio descriptors for tasks such as automatic instrument classification, only a highly constrained set is used to describe the phy...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of new music research 2016-01, Vol.45 (1), p.27-41
Main Authors: Siedenburg, Kai, Fujinaga, Ichiro, McAdams, Stephen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
audio analysis
evaluation
Information retrieval
instrument classification
Music
timbre perception
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A curious divide characterizes the usage of audio descriptors for timbre research in music information research (MIR) and music psychology. While MIR uses a multitude of audio descriptors for tasks such as automatic instrument classification, only a highly constrained set is used to describe the physical correlates of timbre perception in parts of music psychology. We argue that this gap is not coincidental and results from the differences in the two fields' methodologies, their epistemic groundwork, and research goals. This paper lays out perspectives on the emergence of the divide and reviews studies in both fields with regards to divergences in research methods and goals. We discuss new representations for spectro-temporal modulations in MIR and psychology, and compare approaches to spectral envelope description in depth. Finally, we will propose that the interdisciplinary discourse on the computational modelling of music requires negotiations about the roles of scientific evaluation criteria.
ISSN:0929-8215
1744-5027
DOI:10.1080/09298215.2015.1132737