Score-Tool Psychoacoustic Orchestration

28.9.2021 0 Like 0 kommenttia

Doctoral project by Uljas Pulkkis.

In my doctoral project I present an orchestration problem I encountered in the rehearsals of my compositions. The problem is inaudibility of an instrument or an instrument group that I thought to be audible while writing the score. To overcome the problem, I developed the Score-Tool app, which can be used to analyse the score in terms of audibility of desired sound.

The app utilizes the psychoacoustic model used in lossy audio coding in order to determine the masking threshold of the orchestration. In addition, the blending of sound is estimated by comparing the timbre similarity utilizing the mfcc algorithm, that is often used in speech recognizing applications.

In my project, I describe how using this app have changed the way I compose for the orchestra, and how using this app have helped my colleagues in their orchestrations.

I also include in my project other aspects affecting the audibility in orchestration, besides the algorithms used in the app: What is taught about the subject in music universities, what is my personal experience, the effect of the hall and seating, and how music psychology research addresses the issue.

I also describe the development of the Score-Tool app, how the algorithms work under the hood, and what are the features I implemented in the program, along with the possibilities of future research in this subject and other orchestration features, using the Score-Tool app.

Uljas Pulkkis is a doctoral student in the Applied Study Programme at the DocMus Doctoral School of classical music.

Keywords:

• Composition
• Orchestration
• Psychoacoustics
• Masking
• Blending