Modartt user forum - Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

Re: Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2008-01-01T17:47:29Z

Hi Jake

I was just kidding!
I have a somewhat technical background myself and I am always interested to find more details on topics although this was deeper than I could grasp
Further I think that knowing more of how something is made also helps in recreating it...
I'm a graphic designer and I also have to do 3D assignments where I regularly have to think of how a 'normal' craftsman would make an item that I have to recreate in 3D... knowing more of backgrounds helps surely then...

On the music part, I also play guitar, bass and drums for which I actually only use modelling equipment right now; Variax guitar and bass, both modeling guitars, where in the body of the guitars the sound coming from piezo elements is changed to sound like for instance Fender or Gibson guitars. For my drums I use a Roland module on which you can 'design' your own drumkit and change settings like drum depth, type of skin etc.
With all this equipment it helps to know about background of material etc. to get the best results...
Anyway that was a lot of probably unimportant info

Best wishes for anyone for 2008!

cheers
Hans

Re: Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2008-01-01T17:36:31Z

(The pdf version is more accessible, since it includes the charts and diagrams that somehow get lost in the web\html version.)

Re: Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2008-01-01T16:59:09Z

no headache problem Jake, your posts are always welcome
Happy new year 2008 to everybody!
Philippe

Re: Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2007-12-31T22:35:05Z

No, no. There was a series of posts a while back listing various articles\sites with information about what contributes to the sound\timbre of a piano. Just adding to that list, I guess. Over my head, really, but I thought Philippe and Julien might find it interesting, if they haven't already seen it. Probably just gives them a headache, these posts about things they've studied formally.

I did learn some things from the article, though--I didn't realize that each hammer on a grand piano differs, or that the compression of the felt would be so different from note to note. I have to admit that I didn't try to follow the formula all of the way through, though. I got lost when it went into the various grooves. And I kept waiting for some mention of the effect of having different numbers of strings on the compression--the article seemed to assume that the same number of strings was always being struck. I may have missed this, but it seems like it would have a big effect--the compression surely wouldn't be as great when a hammer hit three strings as when it hit one. The article instead speaks only of notes. Maybe the assumption is that the cause of the differing compressions is partly the number and gauge of the strings.

Sorry. I should be learning to play better instead of reading articles I don't understand.

Re: Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2007-12-31T21:36:52Z

Light reading you said????
Thinking about programming your own piano modeller???

Formal article on the contribution of the felts and hammers to timbre

2007-12-31T19:52:44Z

Ran across this article, developed in cooperation with the Tallinn Piano Factory in Estonia, discussing the interaction of the felts and the hammers in creating timbre. The emphasis is on using Young's modulus as a means of determining the ideal combination of felts and hammers.

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:j-...=firefox-a

It's also in pdf format for light reading on a train:

http://www.cs.ioc.ee/~stulov/KLAVER2.pdf