Monday, January 2, 2012

How Fast Does Violin Bowstick Go?

Diana YoungS urprisingly, this 2009 CMT blogpost on violin kinematics keeps receiving a lot of pageviews every day, with page visitlengths averaging more than 3 minutes. (I monitor the tags/keywords that cause readers to land on each page, to better understand what topics for future posts might be useful and welcomed. And, for that 2009 post, ‘bowstick velocity’, ‘bow speed’, ‘bowing agility’, and similar phrases are what people seem to be looking for information about.) So I thought I’d gather together here some relevant links on that specific aspect.

A lso, because some people who are searching on these searchstrings and keywords have emailed me to say that they have a desire to increase the maximum velocities that they can propel the bowstick with, I collect some links below that have to do with various athletic activities involving fine motor coordination and speed of the upper extremity. (For pianists, Czerny and Hanon are of course good. For brass players, Arban. For violin family, the Bauer books look interesting, although I have not tried them myself.)

M ost interesting to me are some of the findings in the research papers by Diana Young and her colleagues (jpeg above), showing a tremendous amount of ‘fine-structure’ in the velocity and force timeseries. No matter how ‘smooth’ we think our bowing is, there are a tremendous number of little variations—some of them arising with the interaction of the bowhair with the strings; other of them arising from the ratchety contraction physiology of our muscles.

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