Relation between violin timbre and harmony overtone
Masao Yokoyama, Yoshiki Awahara, Genki YAGAWA · Proceedings of meetings on acoustics · 2016
The timbre of violins has been studied by several researchers from various points of view including structure, acoustic characteristic, chemical composition of the varnish and acoustic radiation. Although many of them have mentioned that Stradivari’s violin gives the most beautiful timbre, none of them clarified the reasons. In our previous study the timbre of about 30 violins from old ones to new ones had been studied and the relation between harmonic overtones and the expression words, which the audience receives from the sound of the violin, was analyzed. However, clarifying how the structure of overtone is related to the feeling of the listeners of sound such as “rich,” “bright,” and “soft.” was not successful. In this paper, the changes in overtone structure relating to violinist’s performance were analyzed. For instance, the power of non-harmonics frequency, which was assumed as noise, in “powerful” and “rich” expression was larger than that of the scale tone without expression.