The effects of reverberation on music emotion in musical instruments

Abstract

Previous research has shown a strong connection between music emotion and timbre, and that musical instruments have strong emotional predispositions. This thesis investigates the effect of reverberation on music emotion, in particular, the effect of reverberation length and amount. We conducted a listening test to compare the effect of reverberation on music emotion for eight instrument sounds representing the wind and bowed string families. We compared these sounds over ten emotions. We found that reverberation had a strong effect on the emotions Romantic and Mysterious, and it had a reasonably strong effect on Scary, Sad, Depressed, and Heroic, increasing with hall size and distance from the stage. Interestingly, for Comic, reverberation length and amount had the reverse effect, that is, anechoic tones were judged most Comic. These results provide a fresh, new perspective for recording engineers. For example, recording engineers can add strong and long reverberation to emphasize emotions such as Romantic and Mysterious, while using close-miking bring out the Comic character of an instrument.

Date of Award	2014
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology