The objective of the audience surveys was simply to involve interested audiences in the research project by examining how people described the sounds of the Stuart and Steinway pianos. The survey questions needed to be simple, as it was often the first time people had participated in a survey on piano tone as well as being their first ‘live’ experience of the Stuart & Sons piano sound. The survey questions were therefore presented as multiple-choice, using terms that had previously been used in literature which describes piano timbre. The descriptive terms and descriptor attributes were sourced from journals, web sites and published literature. The simplified process involved describing the instrumental tone of the pianos as a complete entity, as for example sounding ‘bright’ or ‘mellow’. Neither piano had a ‘dull’ sound, so the word wasn’t used, though occasionally ‘dull’ was used in the comments, or ‘other’ options in the multiple-choice. The sources of the actual survey adjectives used in the surveys and the results of how audiences responded is documented in detail later in this chapter, after a brief discussion on the complexities of timbre description.
The performances on both Stuart and Steinway in the series of comparison performances enabled a heuristic development of the researcher’s perceptions of the sound of each piano sound, each as a single comprehensive entity. In interpreting the sound as one entity the relational variants of tone are viewed from the perspective that they interact to produce the overall sound quality of the instrument. An example of this is illustrated as a characteristic of directivity in the introduction of chapter four267 , where variations in timbre of one sound were observed as a result of their directivity with the 180° microphone array. In this case, the acoustics of the space combined with the projective characteristics of the instrument to produce varying timbres of the same sound as they were projected simultaneously in various directions. The three findings of chapter 4, (see the table 5.5 below, column 1), which distinguish the Stuart sound from the Steinway sound, can be described as a single comprehensive entity in their difference to Steinway. Over twenty Stuart tones across a 3 octave range were identified as having combinations of the three Stuart characteristics of tone, and forty eight sounds were found to have at least one of the distinctive Stuart tonal characteristics.
The interpretation of each piano sound as a single entity enables a descriptive correspondence to occur between the purely sonic, quantifiable findings of chapter four, and the heuristic information accumulated in the pianistic techniques of the researcher, achieving a integration of both perceptual dimensions. The table below illustrates how both the purely sonic and the psychophysical perceptual qualities interrelate within the pianist’s perception. Each of the three quantifiable findings of the Stuart sound characteristics column 1, are interpreted by the pianist- researcher’s subjective description of the sound quality in column 2, and the pianistic application or response of the sonic and subjective characteristics are described in column 3.
267See ‘Directivity & Timbre, chapter 4.
