Acoustic Guitar Timbre Thematic Analysis

A perceptual study was conducted to investigate listener perceptions of acoustic guitar timbre, encompassing descriptive and preference analysis, and the impact of guitar playing style on perceived timbre similarity and preference.

The listening test was based on recordings of ten different steel-string acoustic guitars at various price points, sourced from the online music retailer Thomann (https://www.thomann.de/). For each guitar, recordings of three different songs were used, each with a different playing style: picking (mainly individual notes played with a combination of fingers and pick), strumming (mainly chords played with a pick), and fingerstyle (strings plucked with fingers rather than a pick).

The study was completed by 27 participants (8 female, 19 male, mean age: 27) of 14 different nationalities. Participants had an advanced musical proficiency (Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index General Sophistication score of 97.85) and 11 of them played guitar as their primary instrument. Participants listened to each guitar in each of the three playing styles and were asked to describe the instrument's timbre, what they liked and what they disliked.

We conducted a thematic analysis of the participant answers to the three questions (timbre description, timbre like, timbre dislike) for the ten guitars using a combination of deductive and inductive approaches. This dataset provides the analysis codebook, theme and code statistics.

Details about the thematic analysis and the study can be found in the accompanying publication currently under revision (the reference will be added in due course).