Klarinet Archive - Posting 000105.txt from 2007/03

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Bright and dark sounds
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:52:09 -0500


Tim, it seems to me that you have neglected an important aspect
of this issue, namely this: what does a player do to exercise
control over the proportion of the frequencies that create either
bright sounds or dark sounds? How does the mechanism work? A
student says, "I want to have a dark sound. What do I have to do
to get one?" And the answer cannot be, "change the proportion of
the frequencies you produce and the sound will be dark." That is
neither comprehensible nor meaningful nor do-able. It is
witchcraft used to achieve an end that is entirely unclear.

I perceive that you are using a scientific method to describe
sound characters, but with no idea of how one achieves those
given popular but meaningless names of dark and bright.

Dan Leeson

Tim Roberts <timr@-----.com> wrote:
On Wed, 7 Mar 2007 10:11:15 -0500, "Jenny Connors"
wrote:
> I assumed that something like this did exist, because my
teacher explained
> to me that a darker sound used the lower portions of the
"circle of sound".
> I thought, and maybe erroneously, that he was referring to a
sound wave.
>

Although it is colorful, the term "circle of sound" doesn't mean
anything.

It is true that a note played on any instrument consists of many
different frequencies. If you play A440 (our long B) and look at
the
note on an spectrum analyzer, which tells you the frequencies
that are
present, there is a big spike at 440 Hz, but there is also a much
smaller spike at 880 Hz, a bigger one at 1320 Hz, a smaller one
at 1760
Hz, and so on, including some surprisingly high frequencies, and
with
non-exact multiples in the mix as well. It is this "mix" of
frequency
multiples that gives each instrument its characteristic sound.

When a tone has a high proportion of those higher frequencies, it
is
said to be "bright". So, one might infer that a tone without
those
higher frequencies is "dark". The problem is that those terms
cannot be
quantified. Is "bright" a bad thing in a clarinet tone? Why? How
"bright" is too bright? How "dark" is too dark? What units do we
use?
And, perhaps most important, what can I do to adjust my own tone
in a
specific direction along that bright/dark scale? These questions
cannot
be answered in an objective way, and that makes it very difficult
to
talk about them.

--
Tim Roberts, timr@-----.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

Dan Leeson
DNLeeson@-----.net

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.446 / Virus Database: 268.18.7/713 - Release Date:
3/7/2007 9:24 AM

------------------------------------------------------------------