[CAUT] Steinway sound

[Anne Acker]

Stephen Birkett and I have done a lot of experimental work on all this, still in progress. Papers to be published. Patience all. 

AA 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Fred Sturm" <fssturm at unm.edu> 
To: caut at ptg.org 
Sent: Tuesday, March 1, 2011 12:19:05 PM 
Subject: Re: [CAUT] Steinway sound 

On Feb 28, 2011, at 8:20 PM, rwest1 at unl.edu wrote: 

> As Fred states, we don't want to see the hammer wobbling left to 
> right, but the fact that the hammer arches back on a hard blow and 
> delivers a strike differently and in a different area of the hammer 
> from a soft blow, a strike without significant shank distortion, may 
> be a good thing, without any more inconsistency of control than a 
> rigid shank. In fact there may be more variability and a wider 
> choice of color and volume. Until, of course, the weight of the 
> hammer is not great enough to really punch out the concerto volume. 


Well, Askenfeld did speculate that the back and forth wobble might be 
the source of the notion of "different touches" producing different 
tone quality. I am skeptical, and think Del is right: the problem is 
that it isn't really going to be consistent and controllable. The 
hammer wobbles back and forth more than half a time or a whole time 
during a blow. If it were in that range, maybe it would be 
controllable. But since it goes back and forth more like two to three 
times, predicting where it will be on impact is really impossible. And 
different wooden shanks, even the same size and shape, will flex 
differently, so if you learn the feel of one, it won't apply to another. 
IOW, it seems like a nice conceptual thing, but I doubt it works in 
practice. BTW, I tentatively think a big portion of the "different 
touch" affect comes from the portion of attack sound created by the 
key against the keyframe/bed. The importance of the attack portion of 
tone is often overlooked, as we tend to focus more on the sustain, and 
attack sound has a lot of "noise" in it. 
Regards, 
Fred Sturm 
fssturm at unm.edu 
http://www.youtube.com/fredsturm 

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