Marc Gelfo wrote: > Hey list, I'm doing a compiled response to many things that > were said recently. My background, FWIW, is in cognitive > science, particularly phonolinguistics, and computer science. > I've done a lot of spectrogram reading of both language and > horn -- for about 3 years I've been studying spectrograms of > my and other people's playing. > > > e.g. I think I'm right (?) in saying that if you play an > open 'E' (F > > horn) then the G and C above will also sound very softly. > If you play > > it with the 1st and 2nd valves then the next harmonic up > will be the 'A'. > > You are wrong. This is what I thought would be the case, but > in fact it's not. You get the same proportions (a harmonic > series) no matter what note you play, and no matter what > fingering you play it with. The fingering you choose > determines things like attack, the ratios of the amplitudes > of each harmonic, etc. That's why different fingerings sound > different. > > I can back this up with spectral analyses, if you'd like me > to. Maybe offlist is the best place to talk about this. > > I have near-perfect horn pitch (I can tell what is being > played on a horn pretty reliably, but not other instruments). > Although I've thought about this a lot I still dont' have a > viable hypothesis. > > > I remember a few modern pieces specifying unusual fingerings (their > > names escape me at the minute). Notes played with 1st and 3rd valve > > often sound a bit stuffy. I would argue (agreeably, of course) that > > there are real differences apart from the pitch. > That has to do with (particularly) the response, the runing, > the amount of tubing you're going through. 1&3 sounds stuffy > not just because it's a longer horn, but because it's > naturally sharp, so we play out of the center in order to be > in tune. That makes it even stuffier. I think these are > characteristics of fingerings, maybe we don't even know why > they sound that way (i.e. we don't realize we're playing out > of center to play in tune), but people pick up on them. > > Steve Freides wrote: > > It is essentially impossible for a human being to distinguish those > > overtones as individual pitches. (If we could, we would have a > > completely different perception of sound than we do, and I believe > > music as we now think of it would not exist.) > > This is very untrue. You can train yourself to hear > individual harmonics. I can fluctuate between perceving a > tone as a single entity and tone as a combination of > overtones. It took me a lot of practice.
You are the first person I've heard of that has tried to teach themselves to do this - I'm glad you are able to do it. I guess it's not impossible then, but it certainly isn't the way most people, musicians or not, hear. > One way I would suggest teaching yourself is to use a > parametric eq filtering, say, a recording of you playing a > long tone. You know the > fundamental, say, is 120 Hz. Use the parametric EQ to cut > 120Hz, use > it to cut 240Hz, etc. down the line. Use it to boost and cut > individual harmonics. You will soon learn to hear them as > individual sine tones that make up the whole sound of the horn. Well, now, that prompts me to ask if, short of using electronics to filter the sound, if you can hear the same note being played by two different, real, live musical sources that are largely similar and be able to differentiate them based on the difference in overtones. I still think this is a pretty tall order. > If you want me to help you set up this kind of experiment, > feel free to contact me offlist. If you'd like to email me with instructions of some sort, I'd be glad to try it if I've got whatever equipment is required. > >> Normally I play an E with 1st and 2nd and a D with 1st so > it should > >> be possible to discriminate them based on their overtones > provided > >> you use these fingerings. > > > > And lastly I say: > > > > This is not possible for human ears. It is possible, I think, for > > scientific instruments. > > That is also not true -- you sure do think a lot of > reasonable things are impossible! Think logically: the two > different fingerings sound different. They are acoustically > different. What stops us from hearing that difference and > learning it? It may not apply across all instruments, but I > think you can surely learn to pick up on the individual > parameters of a note (attack, body, overtone ratios, etc.) . > In the classical music world, people don't think about this > too much so it seems impossible. In the audio world, because > people are designing sounds, they think about and hear these > parameters in great detail. I'm not sure I follow. The difference between the two tones kit mentions will be in the amplitude of some of the partials and relatively small differences at that, assuming they've both played in tune. You're saying, if I tune the slides so both fingerings are equally in tune, you can tell them apart? Or that you can tell if the slides are different but one is lipped to pitch to match the other? Or something else? -S- > > Cheers! > Marc Gelfo > _______________________________________________ > post: horn@music.memphis.edu > unsubscribe or set options at > http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/steve%40fridays > computer.com > _______________________________________________ post: horn@music.memphis.edu unsubscribe or set options at http://music2.memphis.edu/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
