Musicians' Adjustment of Performance to Room Acoustics, Part III: Understanding the Variations in Musical Expressions
Kosuke Kato, Kanako Ueno, Keiji Kawai · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2008
This paper attempts to investigate the acoustic variations in the musical sound signals produced by professional performers under different room acoustic conditions. The sound signals produced by four professional instrumentalists and an operatic baritone singer under simulated concert hall sound fields were recorded by placing a unidirectional microphone close to either the instruments or the mouth of the opera singer. In order to quantify the extent of the variations in the resulting sound signals due to the adjustment of the musical expressions, an acoustic analysis was conducted. The results indicated that the "note-on ratio," defined as the ratio of tone duration and inter-onset interval, of several staccato tones was decreased in reverberant halls. The higher harmonics of tones of an oboist and a flutist were suppressed in reverberant sound fields, while the vibrato extent of a violinist was considerably varied as was reported in our previous study (Part II). Based on the results of the interviews with the performers during the recordings, it was inferred that the variations in the musical sound signals were produced by the performers to adjust to the room acoustic conditions.