Pitch correction has been a part of music production ever since the introduction of AutoTune, back in 1997. Previous research regarding the topic has not found any significant differences when comparing pitch correctors to one another, in terms of how they correct pitch, however little to no research has been done on pitch correctors introduction of timbral and quality differences, when compared to an un-processed original. This study aims to test the notion that the usage of pitch correction software affects the timbre and quality of a vocal performance. The two pitch correctors chosen for this study was Antares Auto-Tune and Celemony Melodyne. 17 experienced listeners participated in an ABX-style listening test during which pitch corrected stimuli were compared to one another, and to un-tuned stimuli to find if subjects could differentiate between the different excerpts. The subjects also gave qualitative motivations for the perceived difference between the excerpts. The result of the listening test verifies the notion that pitch correction signal processing affects the timbre and quality, as it was found that subjects could, with statistical significance, differentiate the different excerpts. The result also shows that the most prevalent differentiating factor was the treble of the material.

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The main goal of this thesis was to develop tools and methods for creating new music for the Japanese bamboo flute shakuhachi. Shakuhachi is an end-blown bamboo flute, which has existed in Japan since the seventh century. The oldest shakuhachi solo repertoire, honkyoku, can be considered as “tone-color melodies”, where the expression is primarily happening through microtonal alterations of pitch and timbre, while the melody is secondary. An early fascination with timbre led the author to the shakuhachi and its sound aesthetics, and towards exploring new methods for making music. The main method described is composing through improvisation, using nonlinearity to focus on the present with the sound and timbre of shakuhachi. To learn about unconscious factors during music making, a micro-phenomenological interview method is used, aiming to reach a deeper understanding of the decision-making and the pre-reflective experience during improvisation. The history, learning methods, aesthetics, and concepts of Japanese traditional shakuhachi music are explored to give inspiration and context for the work, in the search for a personal musical expression within the tradition. Analysis of timbral gestures is conducted to further research the timbral aspect of Japanese traditional music, as well as to analyze the musical connection between Japanese traditional shakuhachi music and the music composed in the project.

The goal of this master project was to create reverberant sound worlds on the border between acoustic and electronic sounds. I approached this goal through the exploration of musical repetition, difference and timbre. These fields were approximated both through practical and theoretical work. This thesis gives insight into my practical work of solo piano playing, with specific focus on the combination of acoustic piano with electronic effect pedals and extended techniques. Reading about and translating concepts and ideas from the fields of minimalism and ambient music has led me to approaching repetition, difference and timbre through thinking-feeling texture. This thesis focuses on the music and concepts that arise in the in-between of these four fields: repetition, difference, timbre and texture. In addition, the text includes theoretical reflections on texture, repetition and listening modes from a conceptual and philosophical angle. This master project has given me new entryways to create music and changed my way of listening. I developed a new style and technique for playing solo piano, which includes a set up for electronically processed and prepared piano. Moreover, I developed several concepts that explain my musical driving forces as well as connect my musical work with visual art and serve as useful tools to share my artistic practice. Especially important are the concepts of uneven repetition, antipiano and texture-gesture continuum. / <p>Anna Wohlfarth – prepared piano</p><p>Marika Markström – electronic processing</p><p>"spatial magnets"</p><p>Solo:</p><p>Anna Wohlfarth – piano, effects</p><p>"3 improvisations"</p><p>Duo:</p><p>Anna Wohlfarth – piano, effects</p><p>Petter Norbäck – sampler, elektronik</p><p>"tonefloat; dark atmo // iceland memories; disintegration"</p>

Modern day musicians rely on a variety of instruments for musical expression. Tones produced from electronic instruments have become almost as commonplace as those produced by traditional ones as evidenced by the plethora of artists who can be found composing and performing with nothing more than a personal computer. This desire to embrace technical innovation as a means to augment performance art has created a budding field in computer science that explores the creation and manipulation of sound for artistic purposes. One facet of this new frontier concerns timbral creation, or the development of new sounds with unique characteristics that can be wielded by the musician as a virtual instrument. This thesis presents Timcat, a software system that can be used to create novel timbres from prerecorded audio. Various techniques for timbral feature extraction from short audio clips, or grains, are evaluated for use in timbral feature spaces. Clustering is performed on feature vectors in these spaces and groupings are recombined using concatenative synthesis techniques in order to form new instrument patches. The results reveal that interesting timbres can be created using features extracted by both newly developed and existing signal analysis techniques, many common in other fields though not often applied to music audio signals. Several of the features employed also show high accuracy for instrument separation in randomly mixed tracks. Survey results demonstrate positive feedback concerning the timbres created by Timcat from electronic music composers, musicians, and music lovers alike.

What are the timbral characteristics of musical sounds? From the second half of the nineteenth century, ideas about musical timbre were affected by contradictory and platitude statements that have lead researchers and musicians throughout history to adopt various models and perspectives. However, the influence of pitch and dynamics has largely been ignored within these models by definition. Another fact had further effects on the history of psychoacoustical research: While Hermann von Helmholtz’s Lehre von den Tonempfindungen was soon translated into English by Alexander J. Ellis, a translation of Carl Stumpf’s standard works Tonpsychologie (1883 and 1890) and Die Sprachlaute (1926) has yet to be published, as are translations of the important writings of other German-speaking successors to Helmholtz and Stumpf (such as Köhler, Schumann, Albersheim, Reinecke, Fricke etc.). Consequently, Anglo-American psychoacoustical research, which has been most influential in this field since World War II, is lacking this particular aspect of knowledge about musical timbre. The relevance of the German research tradition comes to light when we examine an instrument in its entire pitch and dynamic range (rather than only one or a few pitches as in most timbre studies): timbre perception of musical instruments is determined to a certain extent by steady pitch-independent formant areas, whose origin and characteristics at pitch and dynamic changes has generally been resolved today. These timbral effects appear to be in accordance with the principles of Auditory Scene Analysis (Albert S. Bregman) as well as with recommendations in orchestration treatises of the last centuries. Anglo-American models, such as John Grey’s Timbre Space and subsequent research, and German models of timbre perception both have advantages and short- coming. With the help of sound analysis and re-synthesis software and in combination with the concept of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients methods, it seems possible to merge these diverse approaches into a common timbre perception model.

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Ce mémoire tente de comprendre les stratégies des créateurs pour organiser la structure verticale des timbres dans une pièce de musique populaire enregistrée (MPE). Dans la foulée des recherches de Stéphane Roy en analyse fonctionnelle (2003) et des théories gestaltistes de la perception, nous avons élaboré un modèle d’analyse construit autour du principe selon lequel les créateurs de MPE aient tendance à organiser les sons selon trois plans sonores, lesquels assument chacun un rôle distinct dans la hiérarchie perceptive, et que les termes avant-plan, mouvement et résonance représentent précisément ces rôles. Par cette approche, nous cherchons à faire ressortir des lignes directrices guidant, de manière consciente ou non, les créateurs dans l’organisation des timbres dans le contexte d’un monde sonore largement influencé par les nouvelles technologies.

Résumé: Les systèmes de substitution sensorielle convertissent des stimuli d’une modalité sensorielle en des stimuli d’une autre modalité. Ils peuvent fournir les moyens pour les personnes handicapées de percevoir des stimuli d’une modalité défectueuse par une autre modalité. Le but de ce projet de recherche était d’étudier des systèmes de substitution de l’audition vers la vision. Ce type de substitution n’est pas bien étudié probablement en raison de la complexité du système auditif et des difficultés résultant de la désadaptation entre les sons audibles qui peuvent changer avec des fréquences allant jusqu’à 20000 Hz et des stimuli visuels qui changent très lentement avec le temps afin d’être perçus. Deux problèmes spécifiques des systèmes de substitution de l’audition vers la vision ont été ciblés par cette étude: la recherche de correspondances audiovisuelles et l’extraction de caractéristiques auditives. Une expérience audiovisuelle a été réalisée en ligne pour trouver les associations entre les caractéristiques auditives (la fréquence fondamentale et le timbre) et visuelles (la forme, la couleur, et la position verticale). Une forte corrélation entre le timbre des sons utilisés et des formes visuelles a été observée. Les sujets ont fortement associé des timbres “doux” avec des formes arrondies bleues, vertes ou gris clair, des timbres “durs” avec des formes angulaires pointues rouges, jaunes ou gris foncé et des timbres comportant simultanément des éléments de douceur et de dureté avec un mélange des deux formes visuelles arrondies et angulaires. La fréquence fondamentale n’a pas été associée à la position verticale, ni le niveau de gris ou la couleur. Étant donné la correspondance entre le timbre et une forme visuelle, dans l’étape sui- vante, un modèle hiérarchique flexible et polyvalent bio-inspiré pour analyser le timbre et extraire des caractéristiques importantes du timbre a été développé. Inspiré par les découvertes dans les domaines des neurosciences, neurosciences computationnelles et de la psychoacoustique, non seulement le modèle extrait-il des caractéristiques spectrales et temporelles d’un signal, mais il analyse également les modulations d’amplitude sur différentes échelles de temps. Il utilise un banc de filtres cochléaires pour résoudre les composantes spectrales d’un son, l’inhibition latérale pour améliorer la résolution spectrale, et un autre banc de filtres de modulation pour extraire l’enveloppe temporelle et la rugosité du son à partir des modulations d’amplitude. Afin de démontrer son potentiel pour la représentation du timbre, le modèle a été évalué avec succès pour trois applications : 1) la comparaison avec les valeurs subjectives de la rugosité 2) la classification d’instruments de musique 3) la sélection de caractéristiques pour les sons qui ont été regroupés en fonction de la forme visuelle qui leur avait été attribuée dans l’expérience audiovisuelle. La correspondance entre le timbre et la forme visuelle qui a été révélée par cette étude et le modèle proposé pour l’analyse de timbre peuvent être utilisés pour développer des systèmes de substitution de l’audition vers la vision intuitifs codant le timbre en formes visuelles. / Abstract: Sensory substitution systems encode a stimulus modality into another stimulus modality. They can provide the means for handicapped people to perceive stimuli of an impaired modality through another modality. The purpose of this study was to investigate auditory to visual substitution systems. This type of sensory substitution is not well-studied probably because of the complexities of the auditory system and the difficulties arising from the mismatch between audible sounds that can change with frequencies up to 20000 Hz and visual stimuli that should change very slowly with time to be perceived. Two specific problems of auditory to visual substitution systems were targeted in this research: the investigation of audiovisual correspondences and the extraction of auditory features. An audiovisual experiment was conducted online to find the associations between the auditory (pitch and timbre) and visual (shape, color, height) features. One hundred and nineteen subjects took part in the experiments. A strong association between timbre of envelope normalized sounds and visual shapes was observed. Subjects strongly associated soft timbres with blue, green or light gray rounded shapes, harsh timbres with red, yellow or dark gray sharp angular shapes and timbres having elements of softness and harshness together with a mixture of the previous two shapes. Fundamental frequency was not associated with height, grayscale or color. Given the correspondence between timbre and shapes, in the next step, a flexible and multipurpose bio-inspired hierarchical model for analyzing timbre and extracting the important timbral features was developed. Inspired by findings in the fields of neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and psychoacoustics, not only does the model extract spectral and temporal characteristics of a signal, but it also analyzes amplitude modulations on different timescales. It uses a cochlear filter bank to resolve the spectral components of a sound, lateral inhibition to enhance spectral resolution, and a modulation filter bank to extract the global temporal envelope and roughness of the sound from amplitude modulations. To demonstrate its potential for timbre representation, the model was successfully evaluated in three applications: 1) comparison with subjective values of roughness, 2) musical instrument classification, and 3) feature selection for labeled timbres. The correspondence between timbre and shapes revealed by this study and the proposed model for timbre analysis can be used to develop intuitive auditory to visual substitution systems that encode timbre into visual shapes.