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Roughness of violin tones - the perception of irregularities

Otčenášek, Zdeněk and Otčenášek, Jan 

The article presents the results of a second part of a larger experimental study on the perception of different types of changes in the time courses of rough violin sound signals. In the first part of the study, the sounds of a bowed, open violin string (G), played with different bow speeds and force, resulting in sounds differing in roughnesses, were simultaneously documented by a high speed video camera and recorded. The recordings were used as stimuli in a ranking and rating and pair comparison listening test. The roughness dissimilarity ratings and perceived difference verbal attribute descriptors were connected with stimuli positions in a MDS perception space (for the details of the test conduct and evaluation, see [13]). In the presented second part, the revealed multidimensionality of perceived roughness is studied in the context of time course changes in both the audio and the string motion signals. The signal analysis reveals connection of the two of the possible dimensions of roughness (cracked and buzzing percepts) to a signal variability. The cracked percept is connected to irregularities in both signals, and the buzzing percept, to a superposition of regular waveforms of neighboring harmonics (one bark harmonic triads) in two barks of the audio signal.