A multimodal understanding of the role of sound and music in gendered toy marketing.

Literature in music theory and psychology shows that, even in isolation, musical sounds can reliably encode gender-loaded messages. Musical material can be imbued with many ideological dimensions and gender is just one of them. Nonetheless, studies of the gendering of music within multimodal communicative events are sparse and lack an encompassing theoretical framework.

Timbral brightness perception investigated through multimodal interference.

Brightness is among the most studied aspects of timbre perception. Psychoacoustically, sounds described as "bright" versus "dark" typically exhibit a high versus low frequency emphasis in the spectrum. However, relatively little is known about the neurocognitive mechanisms that facilitate these metaphors we listen with.

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.

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.

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.

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.