Recent research has shown that different musical instrument sounds have strong emotional characteristics. It has also shown how these emotional characteristics change with different pitch and dynamics for the piano and solo bowed strings. This paper investigates how the emotional characteristics of the section bowed strings vary with pitch and dynamics. We conducted listening tests where listeners compared the section string sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories. The section and solo string results were overall similar, but with some notable differences as well. The emotional characteristics Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic, and Calm generally increased with pitch in an arching shape that peaked at C5 and decreased at the highest pitches. The characteristics Angry and Sad...[ Read more ]

Recent research has shown that different musical instrument sounds have strong emotional characteristics. It has also shown how these emotional characteristics change with different pitch and dynamics for the piano and solo bowed strings. This paper investigates how the emotional characteristics of the section bowed strings vary with pitch and dynamics. We conducted listening tests where listeners compared the section string sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories. The section and solo string results were overall similar, but with some notable differences as well. The emotional characteristics Happy, Heroic, Romantic, Comic, and Calm generally increased with pitch in an arching shape that peaked at C5 and decreased at the highest pitches. The characteristics Angry and Sad generally decreased with pitch. Scary was somewhat U-shaped and especially strong in the extreme high register. The characteristics Mysterious and Shy were unaffected by pitch. In terms of dynamics, the results showed that Heroic, Comic, Angry, and Scary were stronger for loud notes, while Romantic, Calm, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. The characteristics Mysterious and Happy were unaffected by dynamics. The results also showed significant differences between different section string instruments on notes of the same pitch and dynamic level. Not surprisingly, sounds that were brighter were considered more Scary and Angry, while less bright sounds were considered more Calm and Romantic. Overall, there was a strong agreement between the solo and section strings in eight out of the ten emotional categories, with the biggest differences in the categories Happy and Scary. These results help quantify our understanding of the emotional characteristics of the section bowed strings. They provide audio engineers and musicians with possible suggestions for emphasizing various emotional characteristics of the section strings in orchestral recordings and performances.