Quantifying What You Hear...

[ed440 at mindspring.com]

Matt-

It's my impression that guitarists often have remarkable sensitivity to string timbres (o.k., I admit I was a guitarist first). As you know, on guitar you make the sound by touching the string with your finger, and most guitarists are very concerned with exploring and controlling timbre.  Hard to think of a better way to learn.  It's quite likely that you are more sensitive to sound than most pianists.
Let us know what happens!

Ed Sutton


>It's probably a good time to mention that I'm coming at this with a lot 
>of experience with the guitar, and a little bit of guitar building and 
>repair. I'm new to the piano, so I'm glad I've got  my supervisor 
>Stephen to help me and the people on this list to answer some of my 
>questions. The change in tone over time is a great thing to measure, 
>how percussive the attack, the sustain, the focus, the decay; all 
>really good things. I also agree that the piano is a complex system, 
>and that simply measuring soundboards by themselves is not going to 
>tell you much. I intend to do my work with fully built and tuned 
>pianos. I think that the language that I want to develop should apply 
>to fully built instruments, because that's what we hear and that's what 
>we play, and anything less is going to be only a description of the 
>subsystem without any direct connection to a listener or a player.