Very Slack Strings: A Physical Model And Its Use In The Composition Quartet For Strings
Edgar J. Berdahl, Andrew Pfalz, Stephen David Beck · Civil War Book Review · 2016
Virtual ``slack'' strings are designed for and employed by the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana. These virtual strings are ``slack'' in the sense that they can be very easily displaced, bent, tugged upon, etc. This enables force-feedback control of widely ranging pitch glides, by as much as an octave or more, simply by bending the virtual string. To realize a slack string design, a virtual spring with a specific nonlinear characteristic curve is designed. Violin, viola, and cello-scale models are tuned and employed by the Laptop Orchestra of Louisiana in \emph{Quartet for Strings}.