The physical source of the sound and multi-modal aspects of timbre identification include the psychophysical associations with which the physical sound is being activated and received. The effect of the acoustics of the space, the kinesthetic application/reactions of the pianist to the mechanism and the acoustics, and the inherited biases of the pianist’s experience, all integrate in the psychophysical. The subjective evaluations of timbre in the Piano Contrasts surveys will therefore contain all the bias, expectation and surprise of personal musical experience and opinion. The audience responses of timbre evaluations are therefore understood to illustrate a human perception of the sound as a subjective abstract concept. ²⁶⁵ It was anticipated that audiences would respond with both aesthetic and non-aesthetic descriptions of the sound quality associated with predicted bias and the surprise of something new. The Steinway sound provided a useful measure of the ‘familiar’ in this regard, as it did for the evaluations in chapter four.

The aesthetics of the subjective evaluations made by the performers during the performances are also influential on how the audiences interpret the sounds. A study about the cross modal interferences of sight, hearing, and touch, of pianists’ by A. Galembo found that pianists will kinesthetically adjust to the sound quality and the mechanical mechanism of the instrument as the sound reverberates within the acoustic space, in the effort to produce the desired quality of sonic expression. ²⁶⁶ This sensorial ability was proven to be more reliable in identifying timbre than the purely sonic evaluations. The debate on whether it is the pianist or the piano design that affects the greater influence on tonal quality is of interest here. Is the pianist able to affect the piano sound to produce an intended piano sound, or is the pianist adjusting to enhance the sound of the instrument? This research’s objective is to demonstrate the influence of a different sounding instrument, so it falls on the side of the instrument design as being the more effectual cause of difference in the sounds of the Stuart and Steinway pianos.

²⁶⁵Graham Darke, Assessment of Timbre Using Verbal Attributes, Proceedings of the conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology (CIM05) Montreal, Canada. March, 2005. http://oicrm.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/DARKE_G_CIM05.pdf
^{266     2}Galembo.