A Sensibility Model for Musical Chords Considering the Structure of Auditory Sense

Abstract

Recently, we have been demanding products that satisfy personal tastes. In these days, it is extremely important to make a human sensibility model and then build up a technology system for applying human sensibility to various fields in engineering. In this paper, a human sensibility model for musical chords is studied. The model that uses an artificial neural network is constructed by ccnsidering the structure of a cochlea that analyzes sounds into frequency. The musical chords that are composed of three or more musical tones are inputted into the neural network, and a set of the sensibility information that characterizes “cheerfulness gloominess”, “thickness thinness” and “stability instability” is outputted. After training the model, the following results that agree with the knowledge of psychology and physiology are proved. 1) Some hidden units for “cheerfulness gloominess” and “stability instability” are influenced by the critical bandwidth of musical tone frequency, and furthermore they have “Tonality”. 2) For “thickness thinness”, there is a unit that distinguishes musical tones by frequency. © 1999, The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.