A tone tutor for training student musicians
Gerry Ruch, Chris Kachian · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2019
We present a real time tool for guitar students to practice the production of good tone. Empirically, according to an informal survey of guitar teachers, warm tones are generally preferable to bright tones. Our tool quantifies the tone by determining the fundamental frequency of the note and examining the harmonics. A note with many strong harmonics well above the fundamental sounds bright while a note with only harmonics near the fundamental sounds warm. We have built a smartphone app that calculates the harmonic average of an incoming signal and presents the resulting measurement in real time. This app can be used by a music student during solo practice sessions between lessons to develop good tone on their instrument.