Hello, I'm new to this list, but I was wondering if I could get some help/opinions/ideas about the way sound in musical instruments is described. Currently I'm doing a masters working with Stephen Birkett at the University of Waterloo and one of the big problems we have found is the inability to discuss musical acoustics in any quantifiable way that has meaning to both musicians and people using a scientific approach (not to say that people can't fall into both of those groups at the same time). My work is going to involve piano soundboards, but before I start on that I want to think about and define some ways to describe the sound/tone of the soundboards and pianos I will be measuring for vibrational and acoustic properties. I think we've all used words like bright, muddy, crisp, sharp, round, dark, etc. to describe the sound of an instrument, but these are highly subjective words that are difficult to draw any concrete conclusions from. So the question is, are there any other parameters you feel would be useful to quantify? Maybe there is a way to measure how "bright" something sounds...If you have a concept and some sort of definition to go along with it I'd love to hear from you. Some obvious ones (if these are poorly defined, feel free to redefine them) are: decay time - the time it takes for sound level to decay by a defined amount (ie 60dB, or whatever, I'm thinking of the RT60 definition for reverberation time from acoustics) linked to sustain impedance - a measure of opposition to motion of a structure subjected to a force bloom - change in tone over time response time - is the time a system or functional unit takes to react to a given input Basically I would like to make the link between the frequency and modal analysis techniques available with the language that musical instruments are discussed in terms of. I really doubt anyone has talked about how nice the mode shapes of their pianos are, but maybe if things like this are connected to the way they sound by some common definition or understanding then they could be used to measure the properties of an instrument. I would also like to make the link between these techniques and the way we perceive sound and pitch, something that I feel has been forgotten in a lot of research work. Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated, Matt Borland
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC