Abstract

Though previous research has shown the effects of reverberation on clarity, spaciousness, and other perceptual aspects of music, it is still largely unknown to what extent reverberation influences the emotional characteristics of musical instrument sounds. This paper investigates the effect the effect of reverberation length and amount by conducting a listening test to compare the effect of reverberation on the emotional characteristics of eight instrument sounds over eight emotional categories. We found that reverberation length and amount had a strongly significant effect on Romantic and Mysterious, and a medium effect on Sad, Scary, and Heroic. Interestingly, for Comic, reverberation length and amount had the opposite effect, that is, anechoic tones were judged most Comic.