VERBAL ATTRIBUTES OF SIMULTANEOUS WIND INSTRUMENT TIMBRES .2. ADJECTIVES INDUCED FROM PISTON ORCHESTRATION

Experiments were conducted to explore the relationship between wind in strument dyad timbres and verbal attributes drawn from the musicologic al literature in order to compare and contrast results with studies us ing artificial stimuli and amusical rating scales. In the first experi ment, all adjectives in Piston's (1955) Orchestration were collated an d subsequently reduced to 61 examples. A checklist procedure was used in response to the dyad timbres to further reduce the set of adjective s to 21. The 21 adjectives were used in verbal attribute magnitude est imation of the 10 wind instrument dyad timbres. Principal components a nalysis of ratings revealed four verbal attribute factors, accounting for 90.604% of the variance: power, strident, plangent, and reed. Corr elational analyses demonstrated an improvement in mapping between the ratings and perceptual similarity spaces over the procedure used in Pa rt I of this study. The two-dimensional timbral circumplex was interpr eted as having a principal dimension of nasality versus richness and a secondary dimension of reediness versus brilliance.