Violinist, violin, bow: What can we hear and recognize?
Résumé
The Science and violin making workshop organized every year by researcher Claudia Fritz and violin maker Paul Noulet in France gathers researchers, instrument makers and musicians to make progress in our understanding of the bowed string instruments. One of the daily sessions consists in critical listening, to train our ears, learn how to express and share what we hear, and search for correlations with construction parameters or study various modifications on the instrument, the bow or the playing technique. It is generally accepted that the sound of a bowed string instrument depends on three parameters: the player, the instrument and the bow. During the 2021 workshop, formal listening tests were conducted to explore what a group of trained listeners is able to hear and recognize when one of these three parameters varies. Results challenge common ideas among violinists about the sound quality associated to the bow. A large difficulty of comparing instruments when listening was observed, as the musician keeps adapting to the instrument and only few cues are available to the listeners to decouple the player's actions and the instrument behavior with respect to their influence on the resulting sound.
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