Martelé

Abstract: MANY a high school orchestra violinist has pondered this question while reading concert or contest numbers for the first time, or while studying his part preparatory to tryouts. His degree of accuracy and his quickness of response to this will bring either joy or dismay to the heart of the director. Indeed, there may be a few directors who have raised their eyebrows in seeking this answer which means so much to the effective playing of their string sections. One ventures to include directors because there may be some who are primarily band men or vocalists, and, while they may know the effects they want from the strings, they are on slightly unfamiliar ground when confronted with certain problems of violin technique such as shifting in all its many uses and aspects. No one will deny that this very intimate part of a violinist's equipment can be learned best by actually doing it with one's own bow and fingers. Even though the orchestra director may lack this intimate acquaintance with the problem of shifting, he may learn some things by observation, while others will become clear only by gaining some knowledge of the general principles underlying this important part of string technique. In a brief attempt to shed some light on this problem we will leave out of the discussion bow technique-which is the ability to play the different styles of bowing such as martele, staccato, spiccato, etc.-and the skill necessary in playing the varied rhythmical patterns which are present on every page of orchestra music. Back of these skills is the ability to co6rdinate the left-hand fingers with the movements of the bow. This discussion presupposes this ability. The sum of all these bow and left-hand skills plus the use of the positions is the problem of shifting and of the portamento.

Abstract: The development of real time modeling of musical instruments points out the problem of their gestural control. When a suitable device is attached to the physical model, the natural interaction that exists between a musician and his instrument is preserved, enabling the parameters of the model to evolve following the gestures of the performer. Starting from these observations, in this paper we propose new solutions to control our real time physical model of a bowed string instrument. We use a graphical tablet with different transducers that simulate the behaviour of the bow and the left hand of a violinist. A pressure and inclination sensitive pen that moves on the tablet, as if it was a bow moving on the strings, controls bow force, bow velocity, distance from the bridge and inclination of the bow. Using the pen, we are able to reproduce all the bow strokes like staccato, balzato, martellato in a natural way. In particular, even bow strokes obtained by skilled musicians only after years of practise come out immediately and intuitively from the model. For example, fast repeated balzatos are obtained simply by rubbing the tablet with the pen backward and forward and releasing it, while staccato is reproduced by moving the pen with a high bow velocity and stopping it almost instantaneously. Another interesting property of the tablet is the possibility of working with two transducers simultaneously and independently. We take advantage of this fact to control the model as a left hand of a violinist, responsible for pitch changes, vibrato and glissando. We have experimented with various devices for the left hand such as a glove or a pen. One advantage of these controllers is that they register changes in inclination, while maintaining the same position on the fingerboard,to control vibrato. It is remarkable that the combination of the pen and the "lefthand" transducer allows for bowing several strings simultaneously or sequentially as with a real violin. We show how even a basic model, with a simple non-linear function for the bow-string interaction and a linear part that simulates the propagation of the waves in the strings, gives realistic bow strokes, thanks to the excellent properties of the control. To further refine the synthesis, we also present more elaborated models, that include the measured resonances of the body of the instrument, fractional delay lines for a precise tuning, and more precise bow string interactions. The model, which runs on the real time platforms jMax and Max/MSP, is used by musicians who appreciate its easy apprenticeship and the satisfactory results it provides, especially in concert situation. All these qualities will be outlined during the demonstration.

Abstract: Sound synthesis of bowed strings instruments using physical models offers the possibility of simulating the vibration of the string from the main parameters controlled by the violinist: bow pressure, bow velocity and position on the string. A specific study of gestures that are performed on real instruments would improve the realism of these devices and would make them easier to use. After a brief description of the physical model that has been used during this work, we will present some setups dedicated to the measurement of the gesture parameters applied by the violinist. The data collected from different bowing techniques such as tremolo, spiccato, detache or martele permit to extract characteristic features and to build parametric gesture patterns that can be used to control the physical model.

Abstract: It is to the credit of Francois Tourte (Paris, ca 1747–1835) that modern bows give a more direct impact on the string than their predecessors This feature is of utmost importance when applying off-string, bouncing techniques such as spiccato and ricochet, but even for a stroke such as martele, where quick reduction of bow force is required during the attack With Tourte’s concave-cambered bow, the bow force increases rapidly when the bow stick is falling or pressed against the string With the old concave or straight bows, more movement, and thus time, was required for establishing comparable bow force