Mechanics of Playing and Making Musical Instruments
July 17, 2006 — July 21, 2006
Coordinators:
- Bernard Richardson (Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, Great Britain)
- Xavier Boutillon (Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau Cedex, France)
The general mechanical and acoustical principles governing sound production from musical instruments are now well known and documented (see for example the text from the previous CISM Course “Mechanics of Musical Instruments” and other sources in the reading list). What is increasingly better understood, and still of considerable contemporary interest, are the details of these principles and the ways in which players exploit them during high-level music performance or the ways in which makers can adjust instruments to provide specific tone qualities or playing characteristics. This course has been designed to address these contemporary interests.
The course will provide an introduction to the mechanics and acoustics of major families of instruments in popular usage: bowed, plucked and struck stringed instruments, and brass and woodwind instruments. Building on these basic principles, the course will examine in greater detail the ways in which players can control the pitch, the sound quality and the dynamics of individual notes during performance. These will include lip-reed and cane-reed mechanisms and jet-edge sound generation in wind instruments, the hand-bow-string interactions in bowed stringed instruments, and the haptic interface represented by a piano keyboard. Some non-standard playing techniques will be analysed. The course will also focus on the design, materials and technology of manufacture of musical instruments, concentrating on those aspects which have an important bearing on the sound or playing qualities of instruments, for example the non-linear interactions of a piano hammer; some commonly-held beliefs will be questioned.
A number of exemplars will be used to illuminate general and specific principles of the various classes of string and wind instruments: the flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, guitar and piano. Each will be presented by experts in the field, most of whom are scientists with considerable practical musical experience or knowledge of instrument making. Participants will be split into smaller groups for experimental and demonstration sessions, providing hands-on experience and opportunities for more specific discussions with lecturers.
The course is primarily addressed to graduate researchers entering the field of musical acoustics, those engaged in the subject area wishing to broaden their knowledge, to teachers of musical acoustics, to scientists engaged in music performance, instrument making or having a keen interest in music.
The course will be complemented by 3 workshops (each will be equivalent to 2 lectures) on:
Workshop A: keyboard dynamics and touch, bows dynamics and feel, and various playing questions, by A. Askenfelt and X. Boutillon.
Workshop B: construction of stringed instruments, performance on plucked stringed instruments, acoustical measurements and experimental instruments, by B. Richardson.
Workshop C: techniques for measuring the musical properties of wind instruments, including frequency analysis, input impedance analysis and use of artificial blowing devices, by M. Campbell, B. Fabre, and J. Gilbert.
Each workshop will be repeated three times during three parallel sessions.