Contribution

Detmold interactive Musical Instrument Timbre Explorer (DmITE) - a web application for experiental learning in musical acoustics

Authors

* Presenting author
Day / Time: 19.03.2025, 15:20-16:00
Room: Hall E, Poster Island D
Typ: Poster
Session: Education in Acoustics (Poster Island D)
Information:

The posters will be exhibited in Hall E north from Tuesday to Thursday, sorted by thematic context in the poster island indicated in the session title. The poster session at the specified time offers the opportunity to enter into discussion with the authors.
Abstract: Radiation patterns of musical instruments vary with pitch, which poses achallenge to sound recordings: The ”global” timbre of the recorded instrumentalsound depends on the placement of a spot microphone. To systematicallyexplore the directional dependence of tone color, a Graphical User Interface hasbeen developed. It is a web-frontend to a database of sounds capturing the samemelody played by different instruments under different angles surrounding theinstrument in the horizontal plane. The seamless switching between notes inthe score, between musical instruments, and between different recording angles,is made possible by the IEEE 1599 standard, which synchronizes the variousinterpretations of the same melody to the musical score.A visual representation for the exploration of timbre is given by a polarspectrogram, where the radial dimension represents the frequency, the circumferentialdimension the recording angle, and the color shading represents thespectral density. Side-by-side graphical visualizations and fast switching betweenaudio tracks enable user-focused, experiental learning and complementtraditional surveys of musical instrument radiation characteristics, like those byJürgen Meyer. The application can be useful for educational purposes in soundengineering, orchestration, and composition, as well as in musical acoustics andtimbre research.