AUTHOR=Li Shen , Timmers Renee , Wang Weijun 

TITLE=The Communication of Timbral Intentions Between Pianists and Listeners and Its Dependence on Auditory-Visual Conditions

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717842

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717842

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The perceptual experiment reported in this article explored whether the communication of five pairs of timbral intentions (bright/dark, heavy/light, round/sharp, tense/relaxed, dry/velvety) between pianists and listeners is reliable and the extent to which performers’ gestures provide visual cues that influence the perceived timbre. Three pianists played three musical excerpts with ten different timbral intentions (3x10=30 music stimuli) and twenty-one piano students were asked to rate perceived timbral qualities on both unipolar Likert scales and non-verbal sensory scales (shape, size, brightness) under three modes (vision-alone, audio-alone, audio-visual). The results revealed that nine of the timbral intentions were reliably communicated between the pianists and the listeners, except for the dark timbre. The communication of tense and relaxed timbres was improved by the visual conditions regardless of who is performing; for the rest, we found the individuality in the pianists’ preference for using visual cues. The results also revealed a strong cross-modal association between timbre and shape. This study implies that the communication of piano timbre is not based on acoustic cues alone but relates to a shared understanding of sensorimotor experiences between the performers and the listeners.