Klarinet Archive - Posting 000137.txt from 2005/03

From: "Joseph H. Fasel" <jhf@-----.gov>
Subj: RE: [kl] German sound
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2005 15:09:38 -0500

A colleague of mine who used to work here is a linguist (a
phonologist, in fact). She has a theory that a spoken dialect has
a characteristic tonal center that can heard in speakers' hesitation
sounds: An American says "uh"; an Italian, "eh"; a Frenchman,
the typical French schwa of "le"; and so forth. Now, this tonal
center is presumably dependent primarily on characteristic neutral
positions of the tongue and lips. The lips of a clarinetist are
definitely bound up in a highly artificial embouchure, so I would
be more than hesitant to suggest that this would be influenced by
the player's native speech, but as for the tongue, it strikes me
that there just might be some contribution here. The main effect
(if any) would be on timbre, because of the tongue's position's
effect on the velocity of the air stream at the reed, but there
could be an effect on articulation, as well.

This is definitely a long shot, mind you. To the extent that there
are national characters to clarinet sound (never very sharply
defined), I suspect they have much more to do with the culture
of teaching and performance than with linguistic culture.

Cheers,
--Joe

On Thu, 2005-03-03 at 10:57, dnleeson wrote:
> Well I have a problem up front. The characteristic sound of a
> wind instrument is almost entirely influenced by the instrument.
> That is why a clarinet sounds like a clarinet and not a tuba. A
> man with a clarinet in his mouth is going sound like a clarinet,
> not because of the man, but because of the instrument. Take the
> clarinet out and replace it with and oboe, and it will no longer
> sound like a clarinet.
>
> I will agree that the character of that sound (and I may need
> another work here, perhaps "quality" of sound) is very much
> influenced by the party behind the instrument.
>
> So you see we have some difficulty in understanding the isses of
> which we are trying to speak. This further adds to the complexity
> of trying to formulate a hypothesis.
>
> Dan Leeson
> DNLeeson@-----.net
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Charette [mailto:charette@-----.org]
> Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 9:49 AM
> To: klarinet@-----.org
> Subject: RE: [kl] German sound
>
>
> On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, dnleeson wrote:
>
> > I know about Deutsch's work. She is very prolific.
> >
> > One would have to be crazy to deny that there is a relationship
> > between speech and music, but even Deutsch for whom this is one
> > of life's hot button, has not even hinted that the sound
> > character of a musical instrument is affected by speech
> patterns.
>
> However, if we agree that the chararacteristic of the sound of a
> wind
> instrument is greatly influenced by the player (which involves of
> course
> much more than just the tonal pattern), and the the player's
> speech
> patterns influence both the formants that are involved in tonal
> production
> and cadence of the note groups, may we then create a reasonable
> hypothesis
> that speech influences the "sound character"?
>
> It will probably languish as a hypothesis only for some time to
> come,
> though.
>
>
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