Influence of the instrumentalist on the sound of the concert harp
Jean‐Loïc Le Carrou, Delphine Chadefaux, Baptiste Chomette, Benoı̂t Fabre, François Gautier, Quentin Leclère · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2015
The sound of musical instruments comes from a subtle mix between its mechanical behavior and its interaction with the instrumentalist. For the concert harp, the instrumentalist defines the initial conditions which determine the vibratory contents of the strings. This vibration is then radiated through the soundboard and the sound-box over a range of 7 octaves. Besides, this radiation may be affected by the instrumentalist's physical presence next to the instrument. The aim of the talk is to show, thanks to ten years of research on the physics of the concert harp, how the instrumentalist and the instrument act in the sound from the instrumentalist gesture to the radiated sound. For that, specific set-up and models are carried out in order to carefully analyze each important step of the sound production : plucking, strings coupling, dynamical behavior of the soundboard and radiated sound. These studies are performed when the instrument is isolated, without the harpist, or in playing situation in a musical context. The results show, for instance, that the instrumentalist gesture is a part of the spectral content of the sound, whereas the instrument's design has consequences on the directivity of each string’s partial.