Perceptual evaluation of violins: A comparison of intra-individual agreement in playing vs. listening tasks for the case of richness

Abstract

In previous studies by the authors, it was shown that there is a significant lack of agreement between violinists when evaluating different instruments in terms of perceived richness in free-playing tasks. A new experiment was designed to further investigate the perceptual evaluation of richness using both a constrained-playing task, which was recorded, and a subsequent listening task (using the previously recorded sounds). The goal was to compare the evaluation of richness from playing vs. listening tasks in order to better understand whether they are based more on auditory feedback or tactile and proprioceptive cues in the wider context of correlating audio features extracted from the recordings with richness judgements. Skilled violinists were asked to rank five different instruments by playing only certain notes on the G-string. Subsequently, the players were asked to listen to their recordings and rank the violins. Results appeared to show a higher inter-individual agreement relative to previous studies. Furthermore, the rankings in the playing task were generally different from those in the listening task, indicating that the evaluation of richness is based on different criteria in the two cases. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.