Soundscapes of morality: Linking music preferences and moral values through lyrics and audio.

Music is a fundamental element in every culture, serving as a universal means of expressing our emotions, feelings, and beliefs. This work investigates the link between our moral values and musical choices through lyrics and audio analyses. We align the psychometric scores of 1,480 participants to acoustics and lyrics features obtained from the top 5 songs of their preferred music artists from Facebook Page Likes. We employ a variety of lyric text processing techniques, including lexicon-based approaches and BERT-based embeddings, to identify each song's narrative, moral valence, attitude, and emotions. In addition, we extract both low- and high-level audio features to comprehend the encoded information in participants' musical choices and improve the moral inferences. We propose a Machine Learning approach and assess the predictive power of lyrical and acoustic features separately and in a multimodal framework for predicting moral values. Results indicate that lyrics and audio features from the artists people like inform us about their morality. Though the most predictive features vary per moral value, the models that utilised a combination of lyrics and audio characteristics were the most successful in predicting moral values, outperforming the models that only used basic features such as user demographics, the popularity of the artists, and the number of likes per user. Audio features boosted the accuracy in the prediction of empathy and equality compared to textual features, while the opposite happened for hierarchy and tradition, where higher prediction scores were driven by lyrical features. This demonstrates the importance of both lyrics and audio features in capturing moral values. The insights gained from our study have a broad range of potential uses, including customising the music experience to meet individual needs, music rehabilitation, or even effective communication campaign crafting.

Brightness perception for musical instrument sounds: Relation to timbre dissimilarity and source-cause categories.

Timbre dissimilarity of orchestral sounds is well-known to be multidimensional, with attack time and spectral centroid representing its two most robust acoustical correlates. The centroid dimension is traditionally considered as reflecting timbral brightness. However, the question of whether multiple continuous acoustical and/or categorical cues influence brightness perception has not been addressed comprehensively. A triangulation approach was used to examine the dimensionality of timbral brightness, its robustness across different psychoacoustical contexts, and relation to perception of the sounds' source-cause. Listeners compared 14 acoustic instrument sounds in three distinct tasks that collected general dissimilarity, brightness dissimilarity, and direct multi-stimulus brightness ratings. Results confirmed that brightness is a robust unitary auditory dimension, with direct ratings recovering the centroid dimension of general dissimilarity. When a two-dimensional space of brightness dissimilarity was considered, its second dimension correlated with the attack-time dimension of general dissimilarity, which was interpreted as reflecting a potential infiltration of the latter into brightness dissimilarity. Dissimilarity data were further modeled using partial least-squares regression with audio descriptors as predictors. Adding predictors derived from instrument family and the type of resonator and excitation did not improve the model fit, indicating that brightness perception is underpinned primarily by acoustical rather than source-cause cues.

Perceptual evaluation of violins: A psycholinguistic analysis of preference verbal descriptions by experienced musicians.

In this paper, how the notion of violin quality is conveyed in spontaneous verbalizations by experienced violinists during preference judgments is investigated. The aims of the study were to better understand how musicians conceptualize violin quality, what aspects of the sound and the playing experience are essential, and what associations are formed between perceptual evaluation and physical description. Upon comparing violins of varying make and age, players were interviewed about their preferences using open-ended questions. Concepts of violin quality were identified and categorized based on the syntactic and linguistic analysis of musicians' responses. While perceived variations in how a violin sounds and feels, and consequently conceptualization structures, rely on the variations in style and expertise of different violinists, the broader semantic categories emerging from sensory descriptions remain common across performers with diverse musical profiles, reflecting a shared perception of physical parameter patterns that allowed the development of a musician-driven framework for understanding how the dynamic behavior of a violin might relate to its perceived quality. Implications for timbre perception and the crossmodal audio-tactile sensation of sound in music performance are discussed.

Perceptual evaluation of violins: a quantitative analysis of preference judgments by experienced players.

The overall goal of the research presented here is to better understand how players evaluate violins within the wider context of finding relationships between measurable vibrational properties of instruments and their perceived qualities. In this study, the reliability of skilled musicians to evaluate the qualities of a violin was examined. In a first experiment, violinists were allowed to freely play a set of different violins and were then asked to rank the instruments by preference. Results showed that players were self-consistent, but a large amount of inter-individual variability was present. A second experiment was then conducted to investigate the origin of inter-individual differences in the preference for violins and to measure the extent to which different attributes of the instrument influence preference. Again, results showed large inter-individual variations in the preference for violins, as well as in assessing various characteristics of the instruments. Despite the significant lack of agreement in preference and the variability in how different criteria are evaluated between individuals, violin players tend to agree on the relevance of sound "richness" and, to a lesser extent, "dynamic range" for determining preference.