title: Investigating the role of auditory and tactile modalities in violin quality evaluation.
abstract: The role of auditory and tactile modalities involved in violin playing and evaluation was investigated in an experiment employing a blind violin evaluation task under different conditions: i) normal playing conditions, ii) playing with auditory masking, and iii) playing with vibrotactile masking. Under each condition, 20 violinists evaluated five violins according to criteria related to violin playing and sound characteristics and rated their overall quality and relative preference. Results show that both auditory and vibrotactile feedback are important in the violinists' evaluations but that their relative importance depends on the violinist, the violin and the type of evaluation (different criteria ratings or preference). In this way, the overall quality ratings were found to be accurately predicted by the rating criteria, which also proved to be perceptually relevant to violinists, but were poorly correlated with the preference ratings; this suggests that the two types of ratings (overall quality vs preference) may stem from different decision-making strategies. Furthermore, the experimental design confirmed that violinists agree more on the importance of criteria in their overall evaluation than on their actual ratings for different violins. In particular, greater agreement was found on the importance of criteria related to the sound of the violin. Nevertheless, this study reveals that there are fundamental differences in the way players interpret and evaluate each criterion, which may explain why correlating physical properties with perceptual properties has been challenging so far in the field of musical acoustics.
authors.affiliation: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC University Paris 06/CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean le Rond, d'Alembert, F-75015, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Indiana
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Wollman
authors.affiliation: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC University Paris 06/CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean le Rond, d'Alembert, F-75015, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fritz
authors.affiliation: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC University Paris 06/CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean le Rond, d'Alembert, F-75015, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Jacques
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Poitevineau
authors.affiliation: Schulich School of Music, McGill University, 555 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, Quebec, H3A 1E3, Canada.
authors.forename: Stephen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: McAdams
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D013016:Sound; D014110:Touch / Q000502:physiology*; D014732:Vibration