Acoustical aspects of chamber music for strings
Juergen Meyer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1998
Playing string quartet music under different room acoustics conditions demands adaptation of the playing technique, particularly of the articulation. If not damped by the bow, violin tones have a 60-dB decay time of about 0.5 s in the highest part of the range, increasing to about 1 s for the lowest tones; in the lower stringed instruments, decay times are as much as 3 s. When damped by the bow, the decay times can be shortened to about 0.1 s. Attack times of staccato violin tones are of the order of 30–50 ms; smoothed attacks may be prolonged up to 200 ms. The temporal structure of a fast staccato tone sequence (14 tones per second) is mainly characterized by breaks in the overtones of the order of 25 ms, whereas the fundamentals seem to be blended together or slurred. These values correspond with typical acoustical criteria of historical and contemporary chamber music halls. To determine the reaction of musicians to the boundary conditions as well as the listeners’ impressions, a test was performed by playing the same programs of short and different music examples during only 3 h in three halls having different room acoustic properties.