Subjective Evaluation and Objective Analysis of Timbre Fusion of Chinese and Western Musical Instruments

Abstract

Timbre fusion is the theoretical basis for the study of musical instrument acoustics and orchestration acoustics. At present, most of the research on timbre fusion is carried out on Western musical instruments. There are very few studies on the timbre fusion of Chinese musical instruments. The studies done are mainly studied from a qualitative perspective. Quantitative research on the timbre fusion of Chinese musical instruments will provide important theoretical support for the symphony research of the Chinese orchestra. Taking Chinese and Western musical instruments as research object, this paper constructs a Chinese and Western musical instrument fusion timbre database; a subjective experiment on timbre fusion is designed and implemented based on this database; 45-dimensional objective acoustic parameters are extracted from the database. We use multiple linear regression, random forest, and multi-layer perceptron to correlate subjective and objective data and eventually construct a fusion model of Chinese and Western musical instruments. The accuracy of the models is tested, which shows that the model can predict the fusion of Chinese and Western musical instruments well. This study also found that the contribution rate of each objective acoustic parameter to fusion is different, and there are also differences between the timbre fusion models of Chinese musical instruments and Western musical instruments.