Perception, verbal description and gestural control of piano timbre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Musical expressivity in virtuosic pianistic performance relies heavily on timbre and performers call upon a vast vocabulary to describe the nature of their sound; examples of adjectives include velvety, metallic, bright, round and dark. The present study aims to determine whether this vocabulary, its perceptual meaning and the gesture applied to obtain the sounds it describes, stand as consensual among pianists. The relations between timbre, articulation, register and dynamics are also examined. Nearly 100 verbal descriptors were collected as well as the description of the associated gestures. Some timbres are specific to certain dynamic levels and others are the result of a combination of at least two sonic elements into one resulting sound object, where articulation, - the relation between one note to the next - plays a crucial role. A subset of these adjectives has been selected for further study. A professional pianist performed, on a computer-controlled recording acoustic piano, three short project-designed pieces with several timbres, as designated by adjectives. The excerpts were also captured with microphones to serve as stimuli for a timbre recognition task, both in free form and by selection, to which a group of 17 pianists performed with great accuracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".