Investigating How Convolution Reverberation Effects the Space of Instrument Emotional Characteristics

Even though emotional characteristics in musical instruments can be significantly changed with reverberation, it has been shown that these changes in character are relatively uniform and instrument independent for parametric artificial reverberation (artificial reverberation). This paper investigates whether they are also relatively uniform for convolution reverberation. We compared eight sustained instrument tones with different hall impulse responses over ten emotional characteristics. The results show a similarly remarkable consistency in listener rankings, with strong correlations ranging from 90 to 96%. These results indicate that the underlying instrument space does not change much with convolution reverberation in terms of emotional characteristics, and that each instrument has a particular footprint of emotional characteristics. In fact, the footprints are basically the same for both reverberation, and our results show a correlation of 88% between them.