Laboratory Studies on the Violin and Other Bowed String Instruments
Arnold McC. Small · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1947
Studies aimed at increasing the performer's understanding and control of his instrument have been carried out principally on the violin. Harmonic analyses have been made of tones over a wide range of fundamentals on the instrument with standard bowing and stopping of the string as well as of so-called natural and artificial harmonics. These are presented as specific spectra rather than statistically treated. The relationship between bowing factors and the relative intensity and overtone structure of the instrument's output were investigated by means of a controlled mechanical bowing mechanism. Additional work dealt with air-cavity resonance, effect of elimination of body resonance, effect of mutes, and analysis of viola, cello, and contrabass tones. An attempt will be made to correlate the results with the artistic demands placed upon the performer by music of the past and present and to relate them to the development of string playing over the last two hundred and fifty years.