Download 'String Quartet No. Minuetto: Andantino' on iTunes. Download 'Violin Concerto No. Famous violinists. Ray Chen. First page Prev. Next Last page. By contrast, the less common open string errors may represent a dissociation between the left hand figure placement and choice of string to bow.
The confusion matrix of strings and the pattern of errors with respect to the direction of string change did not reveal any clear trends, showing that the bowing errors cannot be accounted for with a simple mirroring model where the performer moves in the opposite direction to what the passage calls for. It also emerged that players who produced more of one kind of error did not necessarily produce more of another, suggesting that each player encountered different challenges in playing the reverse instrument.
The data collected by the motion capture system was used to analyse the bowing gesture for the Bach Courante to bring quantitative evidence to the predictions and the corrections performed by the violinists.
For each performance we computed the angle of the bow with respect to the body of the violin. There were gaps in the bow data, but the spatial difference between the points was marginal, so bow angle data was calculated using whichever points were available.
The violin scroll, left and right markers were used to create a plane, and two bow points were used to calculate the normal and then the angle between them. The bow angle data was analyzed by computing the histograms of the angles for each performance Figure 8 shows the computed histogram for the bow angles with the four instruments for one particular violinist, P3.
This analysis allowed us to inspect the location and width of each peaks. The width of the peaks might indicate the extent to which performers had to correct their initial predictions by varying the angle of the bow. Wider peaks would indicate more variance in the bow angle, where higher troughs between the peaks would indicate either significant numbers of errors or a larger number of string crossings.
However, the width might also reflect deliberate if unconscious strategies to play closer to a neighboring string for convenience. Figure 8. Histogram of the bow angles relative to a single performance played with the personal Top left , cheap Top right , small Bottom left , and reverse Bottom right violin by P3.
Our hypotheses would predict that the reverse instrument would have wider peaks and higher troughs than the other instruments. Questions also related to whether the small violin required greater precision, in which case the strings are closer together and peaks are narrower, and whether the other violins had peaks in different locations, which might be expected given different shapes of the bridges.
Figure 9 shows the heights, the widths, and the troughs of the peak for each string in the four different conditions. It is visible that the peaks of all strings have similar behaviors, with the exception of the A and E strings, which are lower for the reverse instrument.
The behavior of the peak widths appears less uniform; the central through is visibly higher for the reverse violin. This trough represents the space between the D and A strings, and indeed spuriously playing both of these strings as a double-stop was a common error for most violinists. Figure 9. Means of the peak heights, widths, and troughs for each instrument.
This data accounts for the reversing of the strings on the last violin. We tested the statistical significance of these observations. Two one-way within-subjects ANOVAs were conducted to test the influence of instrument on the width and height of the peaks on each string.
Once this trend was proven, a t -test two-tailed was performed to compare the height of the peaks of the personal violin against the other three conditions. Finally, a two-way within-subjects ANOVA was conducted on the influence of instrument on the location of the strings. We hypothesized that participants would need to perform several string crossings to correct bowing errors when playing the reverse instrument, a phenomenon that could be observed by assessing whether performances with the reverse violin had wider peaks and higher troughs than the other instruments.
Our analysis revealed that this was not the case as the influence of instrument of peak widths was not significant. The lower heights of the peaks of the reverse violin might suggest that violinists struggled finding the correct angle of the bow, especially with respect to strings A and E which, on the reverse violin were tuned as a D and G, respectively. We also hypothesized the small violin to have more narrow peaks due to the higher precision that is required.
This hypothesis was not supported by our results. The difficulties for P3 and P4 were connected to the different measurements of the fingerboard. The comments of participants suggest the idea that the small violin required them to adapt their playing.
Huge adjustments on the left hand because the strings are so close together. It is difficult to play one string at a time. The intonation is very different, it's very hard to adjust to. For the intonation. And then when I changed positions, it was a bit difficult to find the right place. I was not accurate with that and also the articulation. For instance, P2 said that she found it very difficult to shift position with the small violin; the strategy she adopted for improving this situation was to listen to a short glissando.
The experience of playing the reverse violin was particularly frustrating for all violinists insofar as they had to dedicate full conscious attention to adapting their playing to the different configuration of the violin. A direct consequence of the disruption of attention was the termination of the automated response. I can't just fall into my default, I have actually to parse it. For the pieces I knew I had to overwrite my natural inclinations whereas for sight reading I was just parsing and thinking about the mechanical relationship between where it goes on this altered violin.
I think my sight reading sounded better than my Bach. So, it breaks the flow too much. Several participants reflected that they tried to find workarounds to compensate for the disruption of the automated motor controls. Most of it was just A-E or two strings. Those violinists who were asked to play the Bach piece as if they were playing a normal violin, i.
The fingers go where they should, and the same the bow. Because they are different from the notes I would expect so I am not hearing it except in my head at all. I am not pitching it to my head. She explained how she is normally aware of the pitch she is playing by means of the way it rings with the violin. So I was trying to ignore it and just be like: well my fingers seem still.
In this section we discuss a number of themes that we identified by integrating the comments collected from the performers with quantitative results. The comments collected from the interview clearly point to a significant attentional demand while playing the altered violins, consistent with a loss of transparency.
In particular when performing the reverse violin, participants could not rely on automated sensorimotor processes and were forced to consciously plan their actions. An explanation comes from the adaptive mechanism concept from Gentili et al. These additional cognitive load resulted in a self-reported lack of expressivity.
The quantitative data that we collected offer a detailed understanding about the disruption of sensorimotor mechanisms that resulted in a loss of transparency. The initial prediction was significantly inaccurate in both altered conditions; violinists struggled in particular with the reverse violin, suggesting that axis-inversion interferes with generalization of violin playing.
The duration of the performances with the reverse violin were Significant bowing errors were observed only with the reverse violin, and at times it took more than one repeated attempt for performers to find the correct finger-string combination.
The analysis of the bow angle also suggested that the initial prediction needed significantly more adjustment in the reverse condition. The height of the trough between D and A the two central strings suggests that they particularly tended to confuse the two strings or bow the double-stop between them.
The G string and the E string are easier somehow to know in what string I am in. These reflections offer information about the extent to which the ability to play an instrument generalizes to structural modification. Using the classification of generalization proposed by Krakauer et al. The small violin may have aspects of both transfer and interference, in that conscious attention and adjustment were required, but the basic fluency of the performance remained intact.
These results resonate with findings in other domains which suggest that expertise transfer is hard to achieve. For instance, speech learning is highly sensitive to changes of context and does not transfer even when utterances involve very similar movements Tremblay et al. The effect of musicianship and physical familiarity resulted in another notable observation. For those violinists who were asked to play the Bach piece as if they were playing a normal violin, their ability to anticipate movements did not seem disrupted even though auditory feedback on pitch was scrambled.
The sequence of pitches produced by the reverse violin played as if it was normal might be similar to the random-pitch condition in Pfordresher , suggesting that this alteration of auditory feedback would not be significantly disruptive.
One of the most unexpected results came from the analysis of the bowing errors, which indicated that many errors were made that were not related to axis inversion. Specifically, 41 errors occurred when the music did not actually demand a string change. One possible explanation is that the automatic response of the player is to associate a particular note with a particular place on the instrument, rather than thinking only relative to their current position. Another explanation is that the mismatch between their predictions and their current experience created a sort of confusion, which inhibited the access to their internal representation.
A few comments collected from one violinist, P0, support this theory. And I can't actually tell you what I am doing, which means if I mess up while I am playing I am usually completely screwed up because I don't know what I was doing.
My fingers and my physical memory has gone off. So, playing this I had to concentrate on what the actual notes are, rather than just doing it. This concept postulates the idea that the same note or other musical outputs can be produced differently depending on what note or musical output precedes or follows it.
That is a consequence of motor learning that allows the musician to incorporate the actions prior to and following the current one into the ongoing movement recovery and preparation of the current action. These unexpected errors seen in the reverse instrument might reflect issues in coarticulation as a result of disruption to the surrounding notes of the sequence.
The quantitative analyses suggested that the robustness of existing sensorimotor skills to changes in physical form seem to be highly personal. Even though all 7 players were expert musicians, some of them were much faster and more precise at adjusting their predictions. The analysis of intonation showed that 2 performers were able to correct their initial predictions with the altered instruments as accurately as with the non-altered instruments. This was not the case for the other performers: some struggled more with the reverse violin, some struggled more with the small one, and others equally struggled with the two altered violins.
The fluency of their performances also greatly varied. Some violinists kept halting and committing errors with the reverse violin, whereas the performance of others in particular P2 looked nearly fluent, if still slow.
The ratio between the time it took to perform the Bach piece in the reverse vs. The analysis of bow error further revealed that each player faced different challenges in playing the reverse instrument: the number and type of bowing errors greatly varied amongst performers.
The capability to adapt to micro-structural changes also emerged in the interviews that followed the performances with the cheap violin. The aim of our study was to understand how changes to instrument structure after the instrument's functional transparency to the performer. Earlier in this paper, we speculate on the possible existence of a transparency bandwidth. Our experimental design, which considers one example each in two classes of alteration scaling and axis-inversion , does not allow for pinpointing a specific threshold beyond which transparency disappears, though it does show the relative sensitivity of various technical aspects of playing to these two types of alteration.
Future studies seeking to identify a transparency bandwidth might include several gradations in instrument design, particularly in size. It remains an open question whether intermediate designs between normal and axis-inverted conditions can exist.
Future studies could also investigate the specific causes of disrupted fluency on the reverse violin. Notation for scordatura string instruments will often indicate to the player what pitch would sound if the instrument were normally tuned.
Open questions under this condition include the fluency of performance, the presence of bowing errors, and whether the performer would be able to adjust their intonation as quickly and accurately as on their own instrument. Related studies suggest that performance fluency transfers to new instruments after a period of re-adjustment Bijsterveld and Schulp, , which we suggested may be a consequence of a process of updating the forward and inverse internal models Wolpert et al.
We aimed to investigate the extent to which an instrument can be structurally altered before its transparency breaks down. To do so, we examined robustness of existing sensorimotor skills to changes in physical form by operating a number of instrument alterations, inspired by related work on learning generalization Bock, and test how they impacted musicians' predictive mechanisms. Our results showed that the sensorimotor processes that are necessary for instrument transparency were disrupted in case of reverse violin axis-inversion mapping and suboptimal performances were observed in the case of scaling.
The implication is that the prediction mechanism, which is acquired throughout years of playing and that are necessary for proficient performances Zatorre et al. Specifically, sensorimotor predictions seemed to depend on string orientation and on the scale of the instrument. Even small differences in instrument construction were noticed by some performers, who perceived small differences in the lengths of the fingerboard of the personal and cheap violins as something that was difficult to deal with.
Our findings open a number of questions that can be addressed by future studies. First, the present study demonstrates that the prediction mechanism depends on the construction of the instrument but does not precisely identify thresholds above which the transparency effect is disrupted. For instance, what is level of scaling above which sensorimotor mechanisms do not adapt in our study the scaling factor was 0.
What musical material would the violinists would be able to play skilfully on the reverse violin? For example, could they play a single-string exercise accurately, given no anticipated string-crossing disruptions? Our results suggest that the capability of sensorimotor predictions to adapt seems to be highly personal.
However, we are not able to exactly pinpoint what factors contribute to such variability. We invite future studies to further explore these issues with carefully designed, and perhaps longitudinal, experiments. The findings of this study on the musician's ability to adapt to instrument reconfigurations extends to other research areas, and in particular to that of musical instrument design.
When the instrument has different size, we observed, the performance fluency is not particularly affected, but axis-inversion adaptations disrupt it. However, in both conditions performers seemed to have some real problems with intonation.
Furthermore, our result about the performers' different ability to adapt to structural changes suggests that the design process of new or augmented instruments should account for this diversity by including the performer in the design process.
Finally, our participants demonstrated an aptitude to find alternative ways to perform when the traditional way of playing it was obstructed, a relevant aspect to be considered when designing new interaction with a musical instrument while maintaining existing skills. FM and AM designed the study and wrote the paper. FM collected mocap data, conducted the intonation analysis. AM conducted the experimental study, performed the bowing error analysis.
JA processed the motion capture data. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. We are grateful to all the performers that participated in this study and to Matthew Rodger for his valuable feedback on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
The results of her performance are not included in the numerical analyses because of changes to the experiment made in response the pilot. However, we included some of her interview comments in the Discussion section she will be referred to as P0.
For example, G refers to the rightmost string on the reverse violin. Similarly, the correct string is that string which produces the correct pitch, not the one that would be in the expected position on a normal violin. Google Scholar. Bernard, H. Bernstein, N. The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements. The later string bands featured original songs with violin accompaniment in a new bluesy style that takes the voice as its model, playing in loose unison or trading phrases with the singer.
Even during instrumental breaks the violin breathes, taking time for pauses and long-held notes. Tempos are generally relaxed, giving the players space to deploy a wealth of violin techniques: playing in higher positions, broad slides, vibrato, tremolo, or pizzicato.
In contrast to Western-Classical violin standards, the European-American and African-American fiddle and violin styles share a wide variety of ways that players set up and hold the instrument.
They may fatten the curve of the bridge to facilitate double stops, or cut the bridge lower than the classical norm for an easier action. Some fiddle players hold the bow stick several inches up from the frog or rest the palm of the left hand against the neck. The harp is different from the other stringed instruments. It's tall, about six feet, shaped a little like the number 7, and has 47 strings of varying lengths, which are tuned to the notes of the white keys of the piano.
There are usually one or two harps in an orchestra and they play both melody and harmony. You play the harp sitting down with your legs on either side, with the neck of the harp leaning on your right shoulder.
Each string sounds a different note they come in different colors to help you tell one from another and you play them by plucking the strings with your fingertips and thumb. Attached to the bottom of the harp are seven foot pedals, which change the pitch of each string and allow them to sound the pitches of the black keys on the piano. Experience a fun and unique video series from the Oregon Symphony designed for pre-K through elementary aged children and their families to experience popular story books.
A couple of times every week, enjoy one-minute videos created for you, by your Oregon Symphony musicians. Join the Oregon Symphony for a collective musical celebration of the people who are essential in our lives. Viola The viola is the older sister or brother of the violin. Cello The cello looks like the violin and viola but is much larger around 4 feet long , and has thicker strings than either the violin or viola.
Double Bass This is the grandfather of the string family.
0コメント