Perceptive and Cognitive Evaluation of a Piano Synthesis Model

The aim of this work is to use subjective evaluations of sounds produced by a piano synthesis model to determine the perceptual influence on phenomena involved in sound production. The specificity of musical sounds is that they are intended for perception and judgments by human beings. It is therefore necessary, in order to evaluate the acoustic qualities of a musical instrument or a sound model, to introduce a research approach which takes into account the evaluation of the sound quality by human beings. As a first approach we synthesize a number of piano sounds. We then evaluate the quality of the perceived acoustic signal by questioning a group of persons. We hereby try to link the model’s parameters to semantic descriptors obtained from these persons and to more classical perceptual signal descriptors. This approach should give a better understanding of how the model’s parameters are linked to cognitive representations and more generally give new clues to cognitive descriptions of timbre of musical sounds.