Tonescaping: Correlating acoustic measurements with perceived tonal dimensions. An overview

Over the past decade, the concept of soundscape has been comprehensively investigated and standardized within the ISO 12913 series. The norms define a soundscape as the perceived or experienced acoustic environment by a person or people in a specific context. Although originally developed with a focus on urban environments, this paper introduces a novel application of the soundscape framework to the domain of musical instruments, specifically acoustic guitars and pianos. This adapted approach, herein referred to as Tonescaping, aims to establish correlations between quantitative acoustic measurements (e.g., impulse responses, repeatable chords sequences, etc) and perceptual tonal dimensions, with the long-term goal of developing standardized dimensions akin to those adopted in ISO 3382.

This paper showcases how Tonescaping could be implemented by including measurements methods, standardised processes and novel technologies to record, process, reproduce, and assess audio data extracted from guitars and pianos. This work contributes toward a quantitative framework capable of linking subjective tonal perception with signal-based acoustic features.