“Improving Musical Expressiveness by Time-Varying Brightness Shaping”

Mathieu Barthet, Richard Kronland-Martinet, Sølvi Ystad

CNRS - Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique, Marseille, France

Sound examples

Sound examples 1: Effects of the mouth pressure on clarinet timbre

Sound 1 : series of synthesized clarinet tones corresponding to increasing values of the mouth pressure and fixed reed aperture.

The brightness and loudness of the tones increase as the mouth pressure increases.

Sound examples 2: Effects of the embouchure on clarinet timbre

Sound 2a : “normal” timbre (classical mouthpiece configuration)

Sound 2b : “narrower” timbre (obtained by taking much less mouthpiece)

Sound 2c : “twisted” timbre (obtained by taking too much mouthpiece)

Sound examples 3: Relation between timbre and sound level

Sound 3 : clarinet crescendo performed by trying to keep a stable timbre

Sound examples 4: Timbre Material / Timbre Temporal Shape

Sound 4a : original clarinet tone

Sound 4b : resynthesized tone with a fixed Spectral Centroid value (corresponding to the onset of the original tone)

Sound 4c : resynthesized tone with a fixed Spectral Centroid value (corresponding to the offset of the original tone)

Sound examples 5: Time-varying brightness shaping

Bach’s Suite II excerpt (Allemande)

Sound 5a : expressive clarinet performance (Clh1)

Sound 5b : piccolo flute sampler-based performance (Pic0)

Sound 5c : piccolo flute performance after the time-varying brightness shaping (Pic1)

Sound examples 6: Reversing the tones’ brightness variations

Sound 6a : sampler-based clarinet performance with expressive brightness variations

Sound 6b : sampler-based clarinet performance with reversed brightness variations