Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
22nd International Congress on Sound and Vibration (ICSV), Florence, İtalya, 12 - 16 Temmuz 2015
The multiphonic playing technique is used in many different musical instruments. It causes one or more partials to be heard alongside the fundamental. In this study, multiphonics on a grand piano were analyzed. For this instrument, the multiphonic technique consists of using a plectrum to slightly press the piano string at a predetermined point in order to rise up the desired partials. The location of the plectrum along the string determines which partials are damped and which are preserved. The partials that have a node at the plectrum position are more pronounced in the sound. For an artistic use of this technique, the purpose is to obtain a piano sound that could be perceived as different tones sounding together, therefore the plectrum position is adjusted so as to obtain sounds composed by many partials. In the experiments, a high-speed line-scan camera was used to detect the motion of the piano string and audio recordings were also obtained for comparison. The camera was equipped with an optical tube extender for better magnification for the images to be recorded. The resulting camera output images were processed, converted into numerical data, and analyzed in the frequency domain. The audio and camera recorded waveforms are presented for comparison, along with their spectrograms. The camera signal is cleaner and less prone to noise than the audio recording. We have observed that using the multiphonics on the grand piano causes the damping of many of the original partials present on an open string, i.e., allowing only a selected few to sound. It has been noticed that even the selected partials in the multiphonics were damped, resulting in softer sounds than the open string.