Exploring the relation between fundamental frequency and spectral envelope in the perception of musical instrument sounds – sound files and participant responses

This database contains synthesized instrument sounds (sounds.zip), participant responses (data.zip), and a key for the stimulus order (stimKey.zip) as complementary data to [1].

Sounds include individual stimuli for two experiments. Experiment 1 contains stimuli used for sound pleasantness and sound brightness ratings. Every rating scale includes three acoustic conditions: congruent, incongruent, and fixed, corresponding to the relation of fundamental frequency (F0) and spectral envelope (SE). See [1] for further details on this matter. Experiment 2 contains stimuli for four synthesized instrument sounds: violin, alto voice, clarinet, and tuba. Sounds were synthesized using congruent spectral envelopes (all), and register fixed spectral envelopes (low, mid, high).

All sounds are mono signals with a sampling frequency of 44100 Hz in WAV format.

Data includes four sets of participant response data: sound pleasantness ratings (Exp. 1), sound brightness ratings (Exp. 1), sound pleasantness ratings (Exp. 2), and sound plausibility ratings (Exp. 2).

StimKey provides values for the first and second principal components of the synthesis space for the pleasantness (1 to 81) and brightness (1 to 16) stimulus numbers for Exp. 1.

Names convention for Exp. 2 sounds:

InstrumentName_congruencyCondition_F0..wav

References:

[1] Jacobsen, S. and Siedenburg, K. (2024). Exploring the relation between fundamental frequency and spectral envelope in the perception of musical instrument sounds. Acta Acustica, 8, 48. https://doi.org/10.1051/aacus/2024038.