The effect of timbre in clarinet interpretation

International audienceThe perceptual importance of timbre variations was inves- tigated in clarinet expressive music performance. Three basic transformations acting on timbre, rhythm and dy- namics and four combinations of them were applied to solo clarinet recordings in order to remove or flatten some of the expressive variations of the performer. Twenty skilled musicians were asked to choose the interpretations they preferred in a pair comparison task. The rankings of the performances were strongly consistent and this, for two different musical excerpts coming from Bach and Mozart pieces. Multidimensional scaling showed that the most prominent factor used by listeners was linked to the tim- bre of the tones