Author: seabreeze
Date: 2016-05-12 20:48
Babrinka77,
I can't pull up this study to read it; I get a "does not exist" message.
In general, though, studies like these may contribute to the science of ligatures but leave the aesthetics unprobed. You can measure the intensity and number of overtones in a sound, but you can't easily tell from those measurements which resultant sounds music lovers and good players will find the most endearing and will want to employ in their music making. Music after all is an art, not a science or an applied science like engineering. Musicians select the sounds they want for far more variable and often less expressible reasons than scientists or engineers select materials, for something like a bridge, a rocket heat shield, or a radiation containment capsule.
The ligature with the most intense partial distribution will not necessarily be the one chosen by a clarinetist for performance. For example, in the three ligatures
tested, some may find the Ishimori altissimo a bit too aggressive and edgy and may opt for the less intense harmonic profile of the Popa, especially if they have to play something like the Prokofiev Sonata with its loud extended altissimo passages. Good clarinetists are always using the "data" their ears can actually hear and the sensations thier body conveys to them to make choices of gear, rather than relying mainly on non-anthropomorphic electronic measurements.
If the progress in robotics and cybergenetics continues, and a robot is created that exactly copies the hearing and bone conduction and skin feeling collection mechanisms of aural data found in gifted musicians, then that might be a different story. We could program the cyborg to try the ligature. It would select the features we want in a ligature better than we could: equipped with a perfect embouchure, the cyborg could try the ligatures with mouthpeices, reeds, and clarinets, and let us hear why the choices are best.
Until that day comes, no matter what the electronic charts tell us, we will have to still use our own musical judgment in choosing ligatures. By the way, this study appears, from your description, to have the merit of choosing really good-sounding ligatures to test. The Popa, Silverstein, and Ishimori designs are all capable of supporting high-level musical sound production and have found acceptance among very capable players. The Popa, of course, is not the most practical if you have to make quick changes from one clarinet to another in the orchestra.
Can you supply an active link so we can read the study?
Post Edited (2016-05-12 22:55)
|
|
The Clarinet BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
