Anders Friberg
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (bio)
What do we really hear when we listen to music? – A multi-disciplinary perspective
Abstract
When we listen to music we can access a multitude of different aspects on different levels. On a higher level we can make judgements about emotional quality, if it is good or bad, what kind of genre it is, or even which musician that is performing. On a lower level we have the abilities of the hearing in terms of pitch, loudness and other psychoacoustic variables. In order to make high-level judgements we may assume that there is some sort of intermediate processing steps in between. In fact, this is an underlying assumption in most disciplines of music research. An overview of such mid-level features will be given from the perspective of music theory, ecological perception, emotion research, and music information retrieval. Results will also be presented from recent listening experiments where a set of such features were perceptually evaluated and compared to computational features extracted from audio.