Abstract

Previous work has shown that the emotional characteristics of musical instrument sounds are significantly changed with parametric reverberation. This paper considers the effects of reverberation time on the emotional characteristics of instrument sounds with convolution reverberation. We compared eight musical instruments and ten emotional characteristics over five hall impulse responses ranging from the 1-second Royal National Theatre to the 5-second King’s College Chapel. The results showed that convolution reverberation had more pronounced effects on the emotional characteristics compared to parametric reverberation. While the results were more pronounced for convolution reverberation compared to parametric reverberation, there was also a strikingly strong agreement in their results, and correlation coefficient between them was 0.74 over all emotional characteristics. This strong correlation indicates that reverberation time has a remarkably consistent effect on the emotional characteristics regardless of
whether using convolution or parametric reverberation.