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n-ISM Video Gallery

Performance Science projects

Performance science project video summaries from Glasgow University Centre for Music Technology, 2009.

Click on the thumbnail image to view the movie.

Rehearsing Microtonal Music

Graham Hair's Three Microtonal Songs for Soprano, Clarinet and Harmonium require performance in a non-standard scale (19 equal-tempered divisions of the octave). How does the clarinettest cope with new fingerings and finding that on his instrument, 18 of the 19 notes are "out of tune"?

A conversation between the composer and performer, including a demonstation of rehearsing scales and "19-ET karaoke" with the CMT's adapted Rosegarden software, culminating in a video performance of the third song, "Dance".

6m45s

Prototyping the Proprioceptive Bow

Measuring the gestures of string players accurately enough to draw conclusions about their musical decision making is a severe engineering problem. It is obviously vitally important not to influence their playing, so the electronics must be light and unobtrusive. Making the measurements with sufficient accuracy is also extraordinarily difficult: it is easy to hear the difference between a professional orchestral player even a highly competent student, yet the measured accelerations from the bow differ by only an infinitesimal amount.

Orla Murphy, a second year Electronics with Music student, formerly leader of the Viola section of the National Youth Orchesta of Ireland, demonstrates the wired version of the bow, and Justin Caselton, a Masters student, describes some of the techniques which might in future be used to gather additional data from a wireless version.

3m49s

Saxophone Mouthpiece Monitoring

Reed players exercise an almost incredible degree of control of pitch and timbre through embouchure, students of Electronics with Music are encouraged to think of new ways of monitoring their instruments, particularly if they have a high standard of playing.

Emily Tilbury demonstrates her pressure-measurement mouthpiece she and a group of students have constructed accurately to measure pressure variations in a saxophone mouthpiece.

1m41s

Tracking Chopin

Jennifer MacRitchie, a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Music Technology, has a vested interest in measuring pianists' performances. Much knowledge of musical structure which would be invaluable in "machine listening" — enabling computers to extract musical information from audio in a way analogous to human listening — is locked up in performers technical approach to a piece in a way which they would find hard to articulate verbally.

Jenni's invented a highly portable, single-camera machine to record the detail of movements of pianists hands to a high degree of accuracy in time and space. By including a skeletal model, it is possible to extact three-dimentional information.

As well as building this kit, Jenni's remained active as a practising musician over the last three or four years: while working on her Ph.D. she's played three concertos, performed numerous programmes of chamber music with her Trio, and broadcast a Rachmaninov Élégie on BBC Radio 3.

The equiptment has been used by a number of highly regarded professional pianists; the video concludes with part of Fali Pavri's (RSAMD) recording using this equipment.

4m25s