Re: [Shaku] Re: shakuhachi V1 #969

From: Karl Young (Karl.Young@radiology.ucsf.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 21 2005 - 10:08:12 PDT


>> As a Parch fan (though not one that claims to have the ability to
>> pick out pitches at will from the 43 tone scale) I'd love to hear
>> that
>
> I can send you some recordings of that system in action
> if you'd like to hear it. I'd be glad to.
> Just send me a snail mail address off list.
>

great, thanks

>> > The studies that have been done of classical musicians in various
>> traditions (european, and carnatic classic musicians) that show a
>> low-frequency (1 over F) based randomness to the microtonal
>> fluctuations in tuning that professional players make during
>> performance
>>
>> Interesting; I hadn't heard about those studies (wonder if it's
>> somehow related to the result that analysis of the works of
>> accomplished composers apparently yields a 1/f spectrum re. pitch
>> distribution
>
>
> Karl, i should probably backpedal here. i was thinking about the
> distribution of the errors from an odd pov. and I may very well have
> been remembering /mixing up a study about pitch production with the
> above mentioned result about composers...
>
>> ) and it sounds sort of counterintuitive unless I'm misunderstanding
>> something (usually the case !). Is that study really saying that
>> pitch fluctuations for professional players increase with decreasing
>> frequency (as a power law even) !? Somehow it would seem that
>> fluctuations at lower frequency would be more audible and hence
>> players would struggle more to "correct" them but maybe that's wrong.
>> Perhaps there's some funny uncertainty principle going on saying that
>> the product of frequency fluctuation bandwidth and duration are
>> bounded below and given that it's harder to pin down low frequencies
>> with shorter playing duration...
>>
>
> Interesting! This is absolutely not what I meant to imply!
> Whew...My apologies for being so unclear about my thinking, Karl!
> And sending you down such a convoluted trail of attempted
> rationalisations for my non-idea.
>

oh, no problem... :-)

> I will have to see if I can reconstruct the point I was trying to
> make and hope you and others will bear with me and understand that I'm
> just pushing some ideas around about why pitch production and
> perception is such a holy cow to so many musicians, despite music
> cognition and psychoacoustic results...
>
> A good player adjusts her moment to moment pitch production in
> performance in response to a variety of stimulations of various types:
> some adjustments in response to pitch and timbre of other players or
> instrument groups (if playing in a group), some adjustments due to
> acoustics of the room and/or amplification system, some adjustments
> due to a formal musical demands of the score or some taught aspect of
> performance practice , some adjustments due to non-formal or intuitive
> needs. As you mention, sounds with smaller durations have less pitch
> resolution than sounds that linger. So, we have many influences
> pushing this one aspect of sound production/perception (that is,
> percieved Pitch )around. (In Honkyoku performance there seem to be
> additional subtleties to pitch and amplitude and spectral contouring
> that are taught at a formal level, to make it even more complicated).
> Even if the adjustment made in response to a particular stimulus is
> very deterministic and simple, because there are multiple simultaneous
> adjustments the final executed pitch contour deviation that is the sum
> of all of these influences will have a fractal nature. At least, it
> seems to me that is what I'd expect...
>
> Does that make sense or just muddy the waters?
> --
>

yes, thanks, that helps explain what you were getting at, but I'd still
love to look at those studies that found a 1/f distribution for
microtonal fluctuations (there's no doubt some obvious reason why it's
1/f, i.e. "pink", rather than flat, i.e. "white", and was just curious
about that)

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