Julian Villegas

Psychoacoustic Roughness Applications in Music: on Automatic Retuning and Binaural Perception Julian Villegas

Roughness is an auditory attribute produced by rapid temporal envelope fluctuations, and it has been related to musical dissonance. After reviewing the main theories that explain the origin of roughness, a software program created for reducing dissonance through roughness is presented. This software application, based on a spectral model (a physical predictor of the auditory attribute), is able to control (usually, to reduce) the predicted roughness of a sound ensemble in realtime. Experimental results were analyzed with a standard measurement software tool to corroborate the predicted roughness reduction. The audio output of this software application was compared by human subjects with renditions of the same musical content using some well known tuning systems (twelve tones equal tempered and just tuning). The results of these subjective experiments are presented and analyzed. Preliminary results on binaural roughness perception are presented at the end of the dissertation as a new direction of research.