G.J. Sandell and Christopher J. Darwin, "Recognition of concurrently-sounding musical
instruments with different fundamental frequencies" (abstract).
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100, 2683,
1996.
G.J. Sandell and M. Chronopoulos, "Identifying musical instruments from multiple versus single notes" (abstract).
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 100, 2752,
1996.
G.J. Sandell, review of Auditory Display; Sonification, Audification, and Auditory Interfaces, by Gregory Kramer (Ed.), Addison-Wesley, 1994. Music Perception 13/4, 583-591, 1996.
G.J. Sandell, "Roles for Spectral Centroid and Other Factors in Determining 'Blended' Instrument Pairings in Orchestration." Music Perception 13/2,
209-246, 1995.
G.J. Sandell and W.L. Martens, "Perceptual Evaluation of Principal Component-Based Synthesis of Musical Timbres." Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 43/12, 1013-1028, 1995.
C.J. Darwin and G.J. Sandell, "Absence of effect of coherent frequency modulation on grouping a mistuned harmonic with a vowel."
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 97, 3135-3138,
1995.
G.J. Sandell, "Analysis of concurrent timbres
with an auditory model" (abstract).
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 95, 2958,
1994.
C.J. Darwin, V.Ciocca, and G.J. Sandell, "Effects of
frequency and amplitude modulation on the pitch of a complex tone with a mistuned harmonic."
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 95, 2631-2636,
1994.
G.J. Sandell, "SHARC Timbre Database." Electronic publication: World Wide Web URL http://sparky.parmly.luc.edu/sharc,
1994.
G.J. Sandell, Concurrent Timbres in Orchestration: A Perceptual Study of Factors Determining 'Blend'. PhD Dissertation, Northwestern University, School of Music, 1991.
G.J. Sandell, "A library of orchestral
instrument spectra." Proceedings of the 1991 International Computer Music
Conference, 98-101, 1991.
G.J. Sandell, Reviews of Wayne Slawson's Sound Color and Robert Cogan's New Images of Musical Sound. Music Theory Spectrum 12/2, 255-261, 1990.
G.J. Sandell, "Perception of concurrent timbres and implications for
orchestration." Proceedings of the 1989 International Computer Music
Conference, 268-272, 1989.
G.J. Sandell, "Effect of spectrum and attack
properties on the evaluation of concurrently sounding timbres" (abstract).
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 86
(supplement 1), p. S59,
1989.
C.L. Krumhansl, G.J. Sandell, and D. Sergeant. "The perception of tone hierarchies and mirror forms in twelve-tone serial music." Music Perception 5/1, 31-77, 1987.
Ratings of blend showed primary effects for centroid (the location of the midpoint of the spectral energy distribution) and duration of the onset for the tones. Lower average values of both centroid and onset duration for a pair of tones led to increased blends, as did closeness in value for the two factors. Blend decreased (instruments segregated) with higher average values or increased difference in value for the two factors. The musical interval of presentation slightly affected the relative importance of these two mechanisms, with unison intervals determined more by lower average centroid, and minor thirds determined more by closeness in centroid. The contribution of onset in general was slightly more pronounced in the unison conditions than in the minor third condition. Additional factors contributing to blend were correlation of amplitude and centroid envelopes (blend increased as temporal patterns rose and fell in synchrony) and similarity in the overall amount of fundamental frequency perturbation (decreased blend with increasing jitter from both tones).
To confirm the importance of centroid as an independent factor determining blend, pairs of tones including instruments with artificially changed centroids were rated for blend. Judgments for several versions of the same instrument pair showed that blend decreased as the altered instrument increased in centroid, corroborating the earlier experiments. Other factors manipulated were amplitude level and the degree of inharmonicity.
A survey of orchestration manuals showed many illustrations of "blending" combinations of instruments that were consistent with the results of these experiments. This study's acoustically-based guidelines for blend augment instance-based methods of traditional orchestration teaching, providing underlying abstractions helpful for evaluating the blend of arbitrary combinations of instruments.