Chopin Prelude Op.28/4 Acoustic Or Digital?

Thesimon

Administrator

Posts: 4,504
City: Ariccia, RM

April 19, 2012, 11:08

stuyvesaint wrote:
hello useless arrogant

Pity! As one would expect to demonstrate... Bye bye

pianista65

Member

Posts: 11
City: Roma

April 21, 2012, 16:48

stuyvesaint wrote:
hi useless arrogant

This confirms exactly what is said here in Rome: The ox calling the donkey horned.

Thank you for driving out this inconvenient individual Thesimon, I had read very irritating responses even in other posts. These people belong to the class of the dissatisfied who vent their tensions on other people because they cannot do anything productive except annoy the d......s of others.

Turning back to libraries, could you explain clearly the issue I read regarding the production of partials? How does capture work, and how does a product made with libraries differ from a product recorded playing an acoustic piano? Thank you

Thesimon

Administrator

Posts: 4,504
City: Ariccia, RM

February 4, 2013, 14:41

pianista65 wrote:
Returning to libraries, could you explain clearly the issue I read about regarding the production of partials? How does sampling work, and how does a product made with libraries differ from a product recorded by playing an acoustic piano? Thank you

I apologize to Pianista65 if I did not respond to this message which I had overlooked; I reread it today because it was brought to my attention by an email I received.

Harmonics are generated in all musical instruments (drums, bells, piano, guitar, violin, flute) as you see in all instruments whether they are percussion, string, bowed, wind, etc.

Secondary variables such as the quantity, quality, and energy of the harmonics contribute, together with other primary variables, to creating what is called the timbre of the instrument. An upright piano sounds differently from a grand piano even though it has the same sound production ideology, but many assumptions indeed change.

The production of harmonics is due to the nodes that are created within a struck string and thus set into vibration. You may notice in other recent posts that we have spoken about harmonics again, so without repeating myself, I invite you to read, if you wish, how harmonics are counted in frequency to understand their deviation from equal temperament, but above all the deviation of theoretical harmonics from real ones—a topic that determines the emergence of a new variable called inharmonicity, which is also widely discussed elsewhere.

However, let's come to the harmonics obtained through sympathetic vibration, which was the question you asked me if I understood correctly...

By striking a string, it produces the fundamental sound along with all the other harmonics. After the fundamental sound, we find the octave, then (approximately) the fifth, etc., etc.

As the harmonics are generated, subsequent ones lose "strength" and are therefore weaker and less audible, and thus less important for the purposes of sympathetic vibration.

But what is this sympathetic vibration? Let's make an example and say we have two nearby strings, one tuned to C3 and one tuned to C4.

Let's try to set the C3 string in vibration, wait a few seconds, and stop the string with our hands. We will hear the sound of a C4 in the background. Obviously, it was not the C3 (which we stopped) that produced this sound, but the C4 which entered into sympathetic vibration with the second harmonic of the C3 (which was exactly the octave). In essence, the sympathetic vibration of a string occurs when:

1) The string presents no obstructions and is therefore free to move (a necessary but not sufficient condition)

2) A sound of the same frequency as that emitted by the string in question strikes the string.

It is thus demonstrated that a string is susceptible to the movement imposed by its frequency (in reality also by other frequencies, but mainly by its own) if another string producing its same frequency vibrates nearby; then this string vibrates by sympathy.

Coming to the piano, all strings are initially blocked by the dampers, but if you press the C4 slowly without producing sound (just to lift the damper) and subsequently play the C3 for a couple of seconds before releasing it, you will be able to hear the C4 vibrating by sympathy.

Since every sound contains a large number of harmonics when playing with the pedal, we find the dampers lifted and have a great variety of strings vibrating by sympathy. Now, some software simulates this situation, but the combinations are practically infinite, and therefore the sampled sympathetic vibrations are not faithful to those of an acoustic piano and thus are not "filling" the sound as happens in acoustic instruments. This is a major limitation of libraries, besides the fact that one always works within a discrete field, another major limitation.

To answer the other question: what differentiates the sound of a sample from that of an acoustic product recording, you should have understood it from what I wrote just above. Since not all the harmonics that develop in a real case are developed, the key-by-key recording results in a much drier and less realistic sound when playing a chord. In particular, except for very few samples, even when playing a simple triad, one perceives a very static sound that does not occur in an acoustic recording because the recording also captures the interactions between the frequencies that are produced.