Quality of piano tones under different tone stoppings.
Tomoyasu Taguti, Katsuya Ohtsuki, Teruo Yamasaki, Sonoko Kuwano, Seiichiro Namba · Nippon Onkyo Gakkaishi/Acoustical science and technology/Nihon Onkyo Gakkaishi · 2002
Tone stopping is the act of ending the vibration of a piano string by the contact of the damper.This paper studies the perceptual effect of tone stopping.Five performances of a music passage were synthesized with piano tones of simulated tone stopping at sound level, i.e., with the tones that were obtained by processing the waveform of a single, sustained tone of a real piano to induce a desired ending profile with the onset portion kept intact.These performances were rated by ten musically trained subjects with the method of paired comparisons on twenty adjectives.The result indicated that: (1) a short plateau followed by a slow decay made the tone reverberating, lustrous, and beautiful, (2) a long plateau followed by a fast decay made the tone sticky, immature, and blunt, and (3) a short plateau followed by a fast decay made the tone tight, sharp, and nimble.