Interaction between time-varying tone inharmonicity, fundamental frequency and spectral shape affects felt tension and timbral semantics

Musically induced tension has been the subject of thorough study in the music cognition literature but its relationship with timbre is still poorly investigated. This study examines how the dynamic variation of a tone’s inharmonicity may affect a number of auditory qualities, namely brightness, roughness and mass along with felt tension under different acoustical conditions (i.e., F0, spectral shape and type of inharmonicity). Fifty-six musically trained participants gave real-time continuous ratings on eight time-varying stimuli upon the aforementioned qualities. Static ratings over the initial purely harmonic parts of the stimuli were also obtained by a subgroup of the listening panel. The fundamental frequency exhibits the strongest influence on the responses of the four qualities, followed by the type of inharmonicity and the spectral shape to a lesser degree. The profile patterns of mass and brightness proved to be strong predictors for tension profile patterns while the roughness profile magnitudes show a significant main effect on the magnitude of tension profiles. Overall, these results demonstrate that time-varying inharmonicity affects continuous responses on both timbral semantics and tension, while indicating that felt tension may be influenced by underlying timbral qualities in a dynamic context.