On Vibration Sensation and Finger Touch in Stringed Instrument Playing

Abstract

The vibration levels in four traditional stringed instruments during playing have been investigated, including the double bass, violin, guitar, and the piano. The vibration levels, which were measured at several positions and at different dynamic levels, were evaluated with respect to reported thresholds for detection of vibrotactile stimuli. The results show that the vibration levels are well above threshold for almost all positions on the instruments in normal playing. It is concluded that the perceived vibrations may be of some assistance with regard to intonation in ensemble playing, in particular for the bass instruments. The finger forces exerted when playing the bowed strings, as well as the touch forces in piano playing were studied briefly. It was concluded that the kinesthetic forces perceived in playing may assist the timing in performance.

The Role of Haptic Cues in Musical Instrument Quality Perception

“…Askenfelt and Jansson showed that vibrations perpendicular to the side of the neck, measured on four violins of varying quality during playing a single note (lowest G, 196 Hz), were above or very close to vibration sensation thresholds measured at the fingertip under passive touch conditions by Verrillo [61]. However, no evidence was found that higher neck vibration intensity would result in judging a violin as being of better quality [4]. One limitation of that study was that for the piano-is that Verrillo's thresholds may not fully reflect actual vibration detection offsets when the left hand holds the neck of the violin (e.g., differences in location and size of contact area, pressure exerted from the hand on the neck).…”

“…These psycholinguistic investigations provide empirical evidence that vibrations from the violin body and the bowed string (via the bow) are used by violinists as extra-auditory cues that not only help better control the played sound [4], but also contribute to a crossmodal audio-tactile assessment of its attributes. The perception of …”

“…An instrument with a precise and responsive action allows a skilled musician to produce a wide variety of timbre nuances through fine-grained control of synchrony, dynamics, attack speed, articulation, and balance in polyphonic texture. Vibrotactile feedback, on the other hand, consists essentially of the same oscillations that the instrument body radiates as sound [42,49,[69][70][71] and is perceived simultaneously with the auditory signal, but differently [4,6,18,25,31,41,45,62,65]. In contrast to hearing, where maximal sensitivity is in the range of 3000-4000 Hz, vibrotaction is most sensitive in the vicinity of 250 Hz (see Sect.…”

Measuring the haptic behavior of an acoustic guitar as perceived by the player by means of a vibrating actuator

“…These studies have usually tried to associate peculiarities in this behavior to specific sound qualities of the instrument itself. The only work we know about, which specifically addressed the issue of describing the vibrational behavior of an instrument from a player's haptic perception perspective is one by Askenfelt and Jansson [2]. The authors examined the vibrating behavior of several stringed instruments (violin, guitar, double bass, piano) by means of accelerometers, placed on different positions, and holography measurements to identify the patterns of several low-frequency vibration modes.…”

Haptic Carillon: A computationally enhanced mechanical performing instrument

“…Haptically rendered instruments are designed to remove a major flaw in otherwise useful practise instruments; namely, the absence of an authentic sense of touch, or feel, which accompanies almost any instrumental interaction [16]. Feel can be simply defined as force felt by a player at the point of contact with an instrument; a brass player feels the vibration of his lips [19], a violinist experiences vibration and resistance at the point where the bow is held and where the string is depressed [1], a pianist feels different levels of resistance at the key [7] [8] and so on.…”