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 bowed strings. This work investigates how pitch and dynamics influence the distinctive emotional characters of the western orchestral instruments. We conducted listening tests where listeners gave absolute judgments or compared the instrument sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories on the section string, solo string, brass, woodwind, piano, celeste, and harp sounds. For the sustaining instruments, regarding pitch, Happy and Heroic had an arched shape that peaked at C6. Romantic, Calm, and Shy increased until C4 and decreased afterward. Comic and Mysterious d...[ 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 bowed strings. This work investigates how pitch and dynamics influence the distinctive emotional characters of the western orchestral instruments. We conducted listening tests where listeners gave absolute judgments or compared the instrument sounds pairwise over ten emotional categories on the section string, solo string, brass, woodwind, piano, celeste, and harp sounds. For the sustaining instruments, regarding pitch, Happy and Heroic had an arched shape that peaked at C6. Romantic, Calm, and Shy increased until C4 and decreased afterward. Comic and Mysterious did not show a clear common trend with Pitch. Angry and Scary had a U-shape that was slightly stronger at the highest pitch. Sad decreased with pitch. Regarding dynamics, Happy, Heroic, Comic, Angry were stronger for loud notes. Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. For Scary, loud and soft notes were about the same. For the non-sustaining instruments, regarding pitch, Happy, Romantic, Comic, Calm, and Shy had an arched shape that peaked around C6. Heroic, Angry, and Sad decreased with Pitch. Mysterious did not show a clear trend with pitch. Scary had an asymmetric U-shape that was especially strong at the lowest pitch. Regarding dynamics, Happy, Heroic, Comic, and Angry were stronger for loud notes. Romantic, Calm, Mysterious, Shy, and Sad were stronger for soft notes. For Scary, loud and soft notes were about the same. Overall, pitch and dynamics had about an equally important effect on the musical instruments; some characteristics such as Happy were affected more by pitch and others such as Shy were affected more by dynamics. Besides, the particular instrument was more of a secondary factor though still important.