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Record W4408896691 · doi:10.1177/20592043251326391

Factors Contributing to Instrumental Blends in Orchestral Excerpts

2025· article· en· W4408896691 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueMusic & Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicMusic Technology and Sound Studies
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsInstrumental musicInstrumental variableArtPsychologyVisual artsComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Timbral blend is a phenomenon that occurs when two or more concurrent acoustic events produced by distinct sources fuse perceptually and give rise to new timbres. Auditory scene analysis proposes that concurrent grouping cues of onset synchrony, harmonicity, and parallel change in pitch and dynamics are involved in the perceptual fusion of events, but research has also shown that several timbral cues can affect concurrent grouping. We investigated potential factors that may cause different degrees of instrumental blend in orchestral excerpts using rating scales ranging from “unity” to “multiplicity” and from “strongly blended” to “not at all blended.” With linear mixed effects modeling, the factors found to affect ratings included the rating scale used, musical training, timbre class (instrument families involved), the degree of parallelism and onset synchrony of melodic lines involved in the blend, the number of different notes present simultaneously, and several acoustic features related to timbre. Musicians differ from nonmusicians in the use of the multiplicity scale, rating excerpts as more multiple, even if they are fairly well blended, whereas nonmusicians ratings are similar for both scales and to musicians’ ratings of blend. Excerpts with bowed strings and/or woodwinds blend the strongest, followed by combinations involving brass instruments, with excerpts involving percussion and plucked strings blending the least. The important finding of this study on real musical excerpts is in demonstrating the relative roles of the score-based and acoustic factors that are associated with the perception of multiplicity and blend in complex orchestral sonorities as well as the influence of musical training.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.617
Threshold uncertainty score0.441

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.001
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.031
GPT teacher head0.281
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it