HOW GOOD ARE WE AT DISTINGUISHING MUSICAL TEMPERAMENTS?

Emmanuel Friot (1) , Sabine Meunier (1) , Jacques Chatron (1)

1 LMA - Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique [Marseille]

An off-the-shelf digital organ controlled by a MIDI sequence was used to obtain recordings of an excerpt of early music that differed only in the chosen musical temperament. At the same time, the recording of slow chromatic scales made it possible to accurately identify the fundamental frequencies of the organ notes, and these frequencies were in agreement with the theoretical values of the temperaments indicated by the manufacturer of the organ. An Odd One Out test was conducted with the musical recordings to assess the extent to which listeners differentiate between the equal temperament and five other more or less unequal temperaments. Three-sound series were presented, with equal temperament twice and unequal temperament once. The middle interval always contained the equal temperament recording, the listener was asked to indicate which sound was different from it. Over forty participants, including non-musicians and early music professionals, took this test. It turned out that participants overwhelmingly discriminated between equal and other temperaments, with discrimination rates increasing when temperaments were varied in the usual "musicological" order from least unequal to most unequal. Those who had the most difficulty distinguishing temperaments were non-musicians, but those who had the least were not early music professionals.

Mots clés: psychoacoustics; music perception; musical temperament

Domaines: Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Emmanuel Friot, Sabine Meunier, Jacques Chatron. HOW GOOD ARE WE AT DISTINGUISHING MUSICAL TEMPERAMENTS?. forum acusticum 2023, the European Acoustics Association, Sep 2023, Torino, Italy. ⟨hal-04229779v2⟩