G. Sandell proposes the description of the multidimensional composite of tonal elements of one instrument can be described as its macrotimbre –
The features that listeners absorb from such varied inputthat enables them to identify what they are hearing can be referred to as an instrument’s “macrotimbre”268
The Piano Contrasts concerts provided an opportunity to evaluate how two pianists of varied musical backgrounds, two accompanying musicians, and three hundred audience participants of varied professions and backgrounds, described the qualities they heard in the sounds of the Stuart and Steinway pianos. It was of special interest to assess if the majority of listeners could identify differences in the sound quality of the two instruments, and if these descriptions correlated to the quantified descriptions of the pianos’ sound in chapter four.
My heuristic process in developing a sense of the tonal qualities of both pianos whilst in performance is associated with the perspectives of the individual’s psychophysical experiences. Later in this chapter, I provide my own commentary on a selection of the piano performances from the six concert-surveys, as a companion to the results of the participants’ perceptual results. W. Brent describes the difficulty of deciphering timbre is due to the fact that timbre is described both by the quantifiable sonic multi-dimensions of pitch, frequency, loudness, spectral and duration, described as ‘classification’ as well as being:
‘tied to the physical source of a sound, implying complexmulti-modal associations.’269
268Gregory Sandell, “Macrotimbre:Contribution of Attack and Steady State,” Journal of The Acoustical Society of America – J
ACOUST SOC AMER , vol.103, no.5, 1998. http://www.gregsandell.com/portfolio/publications/1998-0620_macrotimbre_ASA.pdf
269 2 Brent.
