The perceptual attributes of timbre have inspired a considerable amount of multidisciplinary research, but because\r\nof the complexity of the phenomena, the approach has traditionally been confined to laboratory conditions, much\r\nto the detriment of its ecological validity. In this study, we present a purely bottom-up approach for mapping the\r\nconcepts that emerge from sound qualities. A social media (http://www.last.fm) is used to obtain a wide sample of\r\nverbal descriptions of music (in the form of tags) that go beyond the commonly studied concept of genre, and\r\nfrom this the underlying semantic structure of this sample is extracted. The structure that is thereby obtained is\r\nthen evaluated through a careful investigation of the acoustic features that characterize it. The results outline the\r\ndegree to which such structures in music (connected to affects, instrumentation and performance characteristics)\r\nhave particular timbral characteristics. Samples representing these semantic structures were then submitted to a\r\nsimilarity rating experiment to validate the findings. The outcome of this experiment strengthened the discovered\r\nlinks between the semantic structures and their perceived timbral qualities. The findings of both the computational\r\nand behavioural parts of the experiment imply that it is therefore possible to derive useful and meaningful\r\nstructures from free verbal descriptions of music, that transcend musical genres, and that such descriptions can be\r\nlinked to a set of acoustic features. This approach not only provides insights into the definition of timbre from an\r\necological perspective, but could also be implemented to develop applications in music information research that\r\norganize music collections according to both semantic and sound qualities.
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