Party of Two? Valentines, Chamber Music & Health

I n writing a successful quartet, composers have to turn inward and look for their most personal musical message. So also do the performers. There is no room for deception—nothing to disguise it and make it superficially attractive. Seduction or manipulation will be obvious and will fail. Everything in quartets and other small chamber forms is about honesty and mutual discovery.”
  —  Saul Bitran, violinist, Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

T    he only way to reanimate these pieces is to play them with friends... When you’re ‘on’, not only are you breathing together, but you are also feeding off each other. You’re playing with someone who does something spontaneously and you respond, also spontaneously, which takes your performance and experience together to another level entirely.”
  —  Kathryn Selby, pianist, Macquarrie Trio.

C hamber music, besides being very intimate, is substantially concerned with understanding the other performer(s) on deep levels—doing this in an open and undirected way—and concerned, too, with being generous and responsive to the significant other(s) and creating valuable and meaningful things together with them.

I n that regard, almost any piece of chamber music might be considered to be coherent with the values celebrated on Valentine's Day. Almost all chamber music nurtures a sense of closeness, immediacy, and anticipation.

Y ou want something that is already at least slightly familiar and known to be pleasurable to and enjoyed by your partner—so there will be low risk of disappointment and the greatest probability for delight.

T o heighten the anticipation, an experience that is already familiar can be the subject of hints or other gestures to plan for the experience and savoring that experience. But in order to be worthy of anticipation, the thing hinted at must also be novel in some way, not routine.

B ut there are side-effects each piece can have—inherent objective, physiologic consequences (unintended or otherwise) that accompany the music’s subjective emotional/cognitive/inspirational effects (see Lemmer and other links below). A little quickening of the pulse and transient high blood pressure is what you are after. What I had not expected is how long (many hours) it lasts!

• Understand distinctions between history, entitlement, and managerial theories of the self and the significant other.
  
• Avoid defensive, self-protective ‘Model I’ patterns of interpersonal interaction that blame others and limit learning.
  
• Emphasize shared goals, fearlessness, and equality—mutual influence in relationship.
  
• Emphasize modesty of proportion, pleasure of execution, resiliency in the face of set-backs, and durability of vision and passion.
  
• Love is an organization—one that is deserving of deliberate, rational, caring management.
  
• Love is an organization that, like any other enterprise, has explicit and implicit processes—and denying this or neglecting the processes can only but lead to chaos, low client satisfaction, and investor disappointment.
  
• Communicate and critically test each other’s assumptions and beliefs openly and often.
  
• Combine mutual advocacy with inquiry.
  
• Combine shared exertion with shared relaxation and a minimum of irritability and aggression.

M    ozart’s and Haydn’s music had only a slight reducing effect on the heart rate of the spontaneously-hypertensive (SHR) rats, and the blood pressure remained unaffected. The normotensive WKY rats showed no reaction at all. Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, on the contrary, caused a massive increase in SBP of around 20 to 30mmHg in the SHR rats which remained discernable over more than 10 hours. The WKY rats also reacted to Ligeti’s music with a raised SBP.”
  —  Björn Lemmer, Institut für Experimentelle und Klinische Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

I  am not saying to eschew the Ligeti in favor of Mozart or Haydn for Valentine’s Day—not at all; far from it. In fact, the Ligeti may be precisely what you two will prefer on that adventurous intimate occasion. You are looking for a string quartet whose climax is like the last lines of a poem that choke you up a bit; focus the mind and heart, so to say. Sort of like catching sight of the sea—unexpectedly; together. Twenty or 30 mmHg of higher blood pressure for a few hours is precisely what you two are looking for...

C    oming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon’s list—of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant; a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum—a concise way that includes them all, implies them all.”
  —  Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.

• Argyris C. Organizational Traps: Leadership, Culture, Organizational Design. Oxford Univ, 2010.
  
• Artemis Quartet. Ligeti: Quartets Nos. 1 & 2. (Virgin, 2005.)
  
• Bernardi L, et al. Dynamic interactions between musical, cardiovascular, and cerebral rhythms in humans. Circulation. 2009;119:3171-80.
  
• Brandt J, Dileo C. Music for stress and anxiety reduction in coronary heart disease patients. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2009 Apr 15;(2):CD006577.
  
• Cadle B. Party For Two: Fun, Fancy & Easy Romantic Recipes from The Date Night Chef. CreateSpace, 2011.
  
• Drucker P. Managing Oneself. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
  
• Gilmore L. Theater in a Crowded Fire. Univ California, 2010.
  
• Hagen Quartett & Lasalle Quartet. Ligeti: Quartets Nos. 1 & 2. (Philips, 2003.)
  
• Hughes J. The Mozart Effect. Epilepsy Behav. 2001;2:396-417.
  
• Hughes J. The Mozart Effect: Additional data. Epilepsy Behav. 2002;3:182-4.
  
• Hyde L. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. Vintage, 2007.
  
• Hyde L. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Trafalgar, 1999.
  
• Jausovec N, Habe K. The ‘Mozart Effect’: An electroencephalographic analysis employing the methods of induced event-related desynchronization/synchronization and event-related coherence. Brain Topogr. 2003;16:73-84.
  
• Lemmer B. 'The rhythm of the heart, the tempus of music: Mozart, Ligeti and the rat,' in Music that Works: Contributions of Biology, Neurophysiology, Psychology, Sociology, Medicine and Musicology. R. Haas, V Brandes, eds. Ch. 11. Springer, 2009, pp. 167-
  
• Lemmer B. Effects of music composed by Mozart and Ligeti on blood pressure and heart rate circadian rhythms in normotensive and hypertensive rats. Chronobiol Int. 2008;25:971-86.
  
• Portera-Sánchez A. Music as a symptom. An R Acad Nac Med (Madrid). 2004;121:501-13.
  
• Preti A, De Biasi F, Miotto P. Musical creativity and suicide. Psychol Rep. 2001;89:719-27.
  
• Rietschel E, Rietschel M, Beutler B. How the mighty have fallen: Fatal infectious diseases of divine composers. Infect Dis Clin North Am. 2004;18:311-39.
  
• Schecter H. Intimate Partners: From Romantic Love to Enduring Chronic Shared Lunacy. StationHill, 2009.
  
• Trappe H. The effects of music on the cardiovascular system and cardiovascular health. Heart. 2010;96:1868-71.
  
• Wolf P. The effects of diseases, drugs, and chemicals on the creativity and productivity of famous sculptors, classic painters, classic music composers, and authors. Arch Pathol Lab Med. 2005;129:1457-64.
  
• Wolf P. Hector Berlioz and other famous artists with opium abuse. Front Neurol Neurosci. 2010;27:84-91.

Chamber Music-Induced Chills

L ast night I attended the candle-lit evensong choral services at Kings’ College Chapel. The 28-voice boys’ choir sang the service.

A t various moments, chills went up and down my spine, listening to the organ and the beautiful voices reverberate through the large sanctuary. “Why does the body do this?” I wondered. Go to PubMed and have a look!

C hills seem to be related to distinct musical structures and the “reward” system in the brain, including parts of the ventral striatum, the midbrain, the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Considerable research has recently been published on “chills”—as “leading indicator” correlates of emotional “rewards” that the brain is just now processing and propagating to other parts of the body, and as near-term “trailing indicators” of individual cognitive and emotional peaks just-past. Phenotypic measurements of physiological arousal (skin conductance response, heart rate, heart rate variability, etc.) consistently show peaks during chill episodes. Replication of the original studies have confirmed that chills are a reliable marker of emotional peaks that are induced by structures in music, that are temporally associated with self-reported subjective feelings with physiological arousal.

F or example, Oliver Grewe, Eckart Altenmüller, Reinhard Kopiez, Frederick Nagel, and others at the Institut für Musikphysiologie und Musikmedizin in the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien, Hannover, find that people already familiar with the music are more likely to feel shivers up their spines at characteristic, predictable moments:

• At transitions from loud to quiet;
  
• Upon the entry of a solo voice or instrument;
  
• When two (or more) parts have harmonic contrasts, such as close-harmony with beat-frequency interference between the notes'/formants' spectra; and
  
• When the music evokes memories of past experiences that were emotionally intense.

T he responses of people who are not already acquainted with a piece of music are, in general, weaker and less predictable.

I n terms of programming for chamber music presenters and ensembles, these findings may lend some support to the traditional precept of including at least one familiar work in each program.

A s listeners or performers, in terms of explaining why our reactions to a work on first hearing are sometimes less vivid or shivery than we would like or expect, the lesson seems to be “Wait awhile. Give it multiple hearings. Assimilate the piece over time, and see what it does to you later.”

A nd, as composers, there is probably no surprise in these findings. Devising chill-inducing structures and mechanisms to create and resolve dramatic tension is what you do and have always done. Understanding the neurophysiology of music-induced shivering and spine-tingling doesn’t provide you with any new tools beyond the ones you already comprehend and routinely use. The aesthetic decisions about when and how often to use them remain the same as always.

I f you’re interested in the recent research on music and shivering, have a look at these papers (links below) to read about various bits of the physiologic mechanisms of music-induced “chills,” such as are known so far.

• Eckart Altenmüller contact info at Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, Dept. Musikphysiologie
  
• Blood A, Zatorre R. Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proc Natl Acad Sci 2001;98:11818-23.
  
• Boso M, et al. Neurophysiology and neurobiology of the musical experience. Funct Neurol. 2006;21:187-91.
  
• Grewe O, Altenmüller E, et al. How does music arouse "chills"? Investigating strong emotions, combining psychological, physiological, and psychoacoustical methods. Ann NY Acad Sci. 2005;1060:446-9.
  
• Grewe, Kopiez R, Altenmüller E. Chills as an indicator of individual emotional peaks. Ann NY Acad Sci 2009;1169:351-4.
  
• Hailstone J, et al. It's not what you play, it's how you play it: Timbre affects perception of emotion in music. Q J Exp Psychol (Colchester). 2009;62:2141-55.
  
• Oelmann H, Laeng B. The emotional meaning of harmonic intervals. Cogn Process. 2009;10:113-31.

Music Lessons and Paroxysmal Mirth

H    vis du har sans for humor, så ved du, hvor godt det er for dit humør og dermed for din afslapning og din musikalsk kunstfærdighed.”

[If you have a sense of humor, then you must know how good it is for your mood and [therefore, or secondarily—] for your relaxedness and musicianship.]
  —  Thomas Raab, Dansk Selskab for Medicinsk Humor.

M y violin teacher, Chiyao "Jackie" Lee, put his fingers on my jaw while I was playing in my lesson with him on Monday night. Immediately that revealed that the muscles contracting there were creating needless, unproductive tension that interfered with the music by imparting that tension to other parts of my body.

T he revelation was so surprising that it made me laugh out loud... a spontaneous giggle from me at this little discovery, hitting me like a lightning-bolt. It’s like a “paroxysm”—instantaneous and uncontrollable: laughing as a kind of a “nano-seizure”.

L ater on in the lesson Jackie puts his hand on my bowtip as I am bowing. Instantly this reveals another fault in the balance of my bow… a fault that’s so delightful to figure out—and so shatteringly obvious in the way that he has revealed it—that this event caused yet another hearty laugh to bubble up inside me!

Y ears ago, Susanne Langer wrote that when it comes to learning instrumental technique, children have a great advantage. Children read “vague and multiple sorts of meaning into pure visual and auditory forms... a fertile openness that enhances intuition, since a child’s mind grasps analogies that a riper experience [of an adult] would reject as absurd.” (p. 110) What I am finding, learning violin as an adult, is a frequent kind of surprise—surprises full of humor that’s directed at my own body, at my own persona.

I n other words, each instrument, including the violin, has a ‘user interface’ (UI). It has a Heideggerian ‘toolness’ or ‘Verstehen’ that has evolved over the centuries to become what it is today—including K-bows and all sorts of other things.

B ut not only the instruments (in my current situation, a ‘composite’ of “violin box + strings + bowstick + bowhair”, or “keyboard + strings + soundboard + pedals”, or “flute body + headjoint”, or “trumpet + mouthpiece”) have UIs. I myself have a UI. My body—has a UI of its own! And sometimes it’s uncooperative. Or let’s just say it is “irregularly irregular” in its cooperativeness. And the learning process precipitates lots of instances where the instrument UI and the body UI collide. One of them balks at what the other is expecting/demanding.

T hen my teacher identifies this “instrument-student corporeal interface conflict” and, by the “mere” act of doing so, makes the UI gremlins vanish (at least temporarily…). That vanishing is so surprising that it is, to me, funny as hell. Makes me laugh, launches these tiny seizures of chuckling.

S ituationally-evoked ‘petit mal status gelasticus’, 50-cent physician phrase.

A nd then, “post-ictally”, when I recover from the chuckling I can continue playing and learning. Jackie is very patient with me. He is extremely perceptive, a wonderful teacher who is capable I think of helping (and surprising) any student at any level—a natural-born educator and one who clearly loves what he is doing.

I  wonder whether his incisive teaching causes ‘status gelasticus’ in other of his adult students…

I t is possible to formulate some features common to all types of humor, including ones involving the experience of something that is paroxysmally surprising, a “peek-a-boo” surprise like what Jackie causes when I have a lesson with him. And, although an overall theory of humor is still lacking, several recent cognitive theories have hinted that humor should be understood as a general biological process of navigating and acting in an ever-changing cognitive environment—which in turn involves discovering and recognizing repeated patterns in novel experiences, internalizing/learning them, and predicting them in the future. The humor comes when some other human being basically “re-wires” or “re-codes” your own body’s UI. You think you “own” your body and “understand” your body. Hogwash. You do not own your body. Your teacher has just re-wired you! That is immensely funny and surprising, to anyone who thinks like an adult. There is the giddiness of a child who has just learned to walk, or to tie her shoes. There is the giddiness of a stroke patient who in rehab is able now to move a limb that he never dreamed he would be able to move again. And there is my giddiness at music lessons.

T homas Raab and colleagues in Copenhagen have recently published papers on the theory of humor—the cognitive and physiological science of humor. You may like to have a look at their website (link below).

L aughter induces the release of beta-endorphins which bind µ3 opiate receptors in the endothelial lining of our blood vessels. Laughter also induces a direct release of nitric oxide (NO) in the circulation. Researchers actually publish scholarly papers on this!

B oth of these—the endorphins and the NO suddenly entering the bloodstream in generous amounts—cause the blood vessels to relax and dilate, and blood pressure promptly goes down (see Miller & Fry 2009). All of that is good for the musicality of whatever sounds we produce.

W hat else? Well, in 1987 Terry Winograd’s and Fernando Flores’s book (link below) was new. It has been my ‘10 Commandments’ reference as I have worked in my professional employment as a software developer over the past 23 years. They prominently feature analysis of computer UIs’ toolness in terms of Heidegger’s philosophical theories. My violin lesson with Jackie on Monday night caused me to pull Winograd & Flores off my bookshelf and re-read it, this time with an eye toward UIs of musical instruments.

M artin Heidegger in the 1930s wrote the bible, so to say, on ontology of toolness. He used the example of hammers, as archtypical of tools with good UIs. You don’t have to learn an abstraction to use it. Little kids when first encountering a hammer and without any parental teaching pick up hammer and begin using it, mostly in the intended hammerlike use-case. Heideggerian ‘toolness’, ‘immanence’—‘usability’, if you like—or the ordinary German word ‘verstehen’.

V erstehen basically means ‘thereness’, ‘openness to experience’, or ‘primordial comprehendability’. Those are the most adequate expressions to convey what it really means. The usual English dictionary translation of verstehen is wimpy, though. Usually some lame, card-boardy thing like ‘understanding’, way too cerebral. That’s not what it means. Not primeval enough. Verstehen is seeing a hook-like object and reflexively and instantaneously imagining that you could use it to catch fish, or seeing a sharp-edged object and imagining without any internal discourse or deliberation that “I could kill and eat food with that”. Or seeing a Google search UI or a good videogame UI and knowing immediately how to interact with it to get a good, valuable, winning result.

O r, for me, feeling the big muscles of my body, plus and arm and right hand, propelling bow with a tension-free, childlike, immanent bowhold—to produce an aesthetically commendable note. Preferrably lots of them, strung together into an aesthetically commendable performance.

B elow are links to my favorite books on the topic of UIs and ‘toolness’, mirthful and otherwise. The value and relevance of Heidegger’s and La Tour’s writings on ‘verstehen’ and the ontology of instruments as being-in-the-world are, I think, underappreciated by musicians…

T aiwanese violist Jackie Lee (my teacher) is a recipient of top prize awards in the ICO Concerto Competition, the Cleveland Institute Concerto Competition, the Ekstrand Competition, the National Viola Competition of Taiwan, and the Taipei City Viola Competition. As an active chamber musician, Lee was a member of the Satori Quartet. Lee has appeared in concerts at the Alice Tully Hall, Harris Hall, Vilar Center, and Severance Hall. He has performed at many summer music festivals, including the Music Academy of the West, Audubon Quartet Seminar and the Takacs Quartet Seminar. Besides serving as a faculty member at the UMKC Academy of Music and Dance (a component of the UMKC Conservatory), Lee’s other teaching activities include the Youth Programs of the Aspen Festival, the Bravo Music Festival, the Kneisel Hall Music Festival and the Taiwan National Institute of Art Summer Chamber Music Academy. Lee received his Master degree in Viola Performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music. While studying there, he also received a degree in Audio Recording Engineering. He is currently a DMA candidate at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.

• Dansk Selskab for Medicinsk Humor (Thomas Raab, et al.)
  
• Foundation for the Advancement of String Education (FASE)
  
• American String Teachers' Association (ASTA)
  
• Bogost I. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT, 2006.
  
• Giuliani N, McRae K, Gross J. The up- and down-regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. The up- and down-regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. Emotion 2008; 8:714-9.
  
• Green B, Gallwey W. The Inner Game of Music. Doubleday, 1986.
  
• Harman G. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. OpenCourt, 2002.
  
• Harman G. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Anamnesis; Immanence; Toolness; Ontology of ready-to-handness). Re, 2009.
  
• Kaptelinin V, Czerwinski M, eds. Beyond the Desktop Metaphor. MIT, 2007.
  
• Langer S. Philosophy in a New Key. Harvard Univ, 1951.
  
• Miller M, Fry W. The effect of laughter on the human cardiovascular system. Med Hypotheses. 26-MAY-2009.
  
• Werner K. Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within. Aebersold, 1996.
  
• Will W. Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self. Amadeus, 2006.
  
• Winograd T, Flores F. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Morgan-Kaufmann, 1987.
  Carnegie Mellon Univ tutorial on Heidegger

Pulse! : Motivic Wave Propagation in the Chamber Music of Elliott Carter

T  he Second Quartet signifies for Carter a leap forward in terms of control of harmony (and, by extension, melody), register, and rhythm, from the smallest rhythm to the largest form, and including the way in which time passes in the piece—in each part, and in the whole.”
  —  Robert Kirzinger, Program Notes, p. 67.

The BSO’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood (Elliott Carter Centenary) on Wednesday had a wonderful performance by members of the New Fromm ensemble.

• Quintet for Piano and Strings (1991) [Henry Ward (oboe), Raymond Santos (clarinet), Rose Vrbsky (bassoon), Lauren Moore (horn), Nolan Pearson (piano)]
  
• String Quartet No. 2 (1959) [Stephanie Nussbaum (1^st violin), Martin Schultz (2^nd violin), Garth Zehngut (viola), Kathryn Bates (cello)]

The rich textures and rhythmic complexity thoroughly diverted the appreciative SRO audience filling the 200-seat Chamber Music Hall. (The Chamber Music Hall is a weather-worn barn with wood plank walls, 2-by-10 rafters, and simple folding-chair seating in the west side of the Tanglewood campus in Lenox, Massachusetts.)

From the tiny scale of microsounds and fragments and motives, to the large scale of whole movements of a piece, to the yet-larger scales of multiple works by a composer, a pattern normally only attains a level of significance if it occurs more than once, in more than one setting. In Carter’s chamber music works we experience a wide and innovative range of evocative patterns. For those of you who are interested in the theory of such things, the recurrence of patterns is treated from a post-modern intertextuality and other perspectives in Steven Jan’s nice book, ‘The Memetics of Music’.

But it’s more than that, more than sequences and recurrences. In Wednesday afternoon’s performance: we experienced the ‘vascular’ or ‘hemodynamic’ propagation of musical motives and phrases, as though they were blood. Within a Carter piece, it as though the expression in one instrument’s part is like a contraction of the heart, sending a pulse of blood outward into the circulatory system—of the composition, of the performance. Depending on the distance traveled and the stretchiness or ‘compliance’ of the blood vessels (the channels of acoustic and visual communication that prevail amongst the performers and the neurophysiology of their attention), the pressure ‘wave’ that is ejected in each pulse propagates with a finite speed and has its effects on the other body systems some milliseconds to seconds later. In other words, the patterns propagate, not so much as intimate ‘conversations’, but as though they were blood pressure waves from successive heartbeats among the various organs (instruments/parts) that comprise this living organism of performers.


Furthermore, between and among compositions by a particular composer like Carter, I think the morphologically and dynamically similar expressions are like Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish genes’, propagating down through generations of a species. The stylized Carterian naturalism to which conductor Oliver Knussen referred on Monday here arises in part through a kind of organic, self-replicating, mutually-reinforcing recursion. In the ‘refinements’ of Carter’s style, we see a cumulative evolutionary ‘selection’ among the best and most effective of these self-conserving compositional ‘genes’. (I suppose the idea can be over-done, pushed beyond the limits of its validity. All I am saying is that there is more to the human composer than intellect and ‘will’. There is an unconscious, organic element, too. And only by hearing several pieces in close succession—ones composed decades apart from each other—only by doing this is one likely to hear these possibilities and think these thoughts.)

Propagation of expressions in ‘waves’. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as acoustic particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds—and they do so as though they had mass and viscosity. This Carter quintet and this Carter quartet feel as though they were made of living, flowing blood.


What do I deduce from this? Rather than looking at the performer as an ‘instrument’ of the analyst/composer—as an ‘executant’—we should remember that the performer’s interpretive choices are themselves inherently analytical. But (of course!) the performer’s ‘analysis’ is not 100% cerebral. The neurophysiology of pitch and rhythm kicks in, and—here, nicely illustrated by the Tanglewood New Fromm Players’ performance of these Carter pieces—we get these genuine, honest, primal, highly physical interpretive responses. Some of you Conservatory-based theorists may want to confer with your cardiologist and neurophysiologist colleagues over in the School of Medicine, to see whether the analytics that are used to study human circulatory and nervous systems can be brought to bear on better understanding some of this wonderful, exciting music by Elliott Carter. And have a look at some of the sources in the list of links below.

Thank you for this superb performance! Bravo, New Fromm artists!

• BSO Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music
  
• Carter page at Classical.net
  
• Carter Centenary website
  
• Kozinn A. Blogging at Tanglewood on NYT ArtsBeat.
  
• Barolsky D. The performer as analyst. MTO 2007; 13:1
  
• Cope D. Computer Models of Musical Creativity. MIT, 2005.
  
• Jan S. The Memetics of Music. Ashgate, 2007.
  
• Kostek B. Perception-Based Data Processing in Acoustics: Applications to Music Information Retrieval and Psychophysiology of Hearing. Springer, 2005.
  
• Lester J. “Performance and Analysis: Interaction and Interpretation,” in The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation, ed. John Rink. 2e. Cambridge Univ, 2005, pp. 197–216.
  
• Marsden A. Representing Musical Time: A Temporal-Logic Approach. Routledge, 2000.
  
• Mazzola G. The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance. Birkhäuser Basel, 2003.
  
• Temperley D. Music and Probability. MIT, 2007.
  
• Temperley D. The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. MIT, 2004.
  
• Thaut M. Rhythm, Music, and the Brain: Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications. MIT, 2007.
  
• SimTK cardiovascular dynamics simulation

I  love Elliott, but I loved his music first. (I can’t do this in reverse; I can’t love the music just based on a rapport with the composer.)”
  —  Conductor James Levine.

Miking a Violin

B asic technique:
1. Place a mic slightly above and about 2 meters in front of the violin;
2. Place a ribbon mic over the player’s [right] shoulder;
3. Position a mic [5 cm to 15 cm] underneath the violin;
4. Position a mic behind the violinist so that the head and body of the violinist are partially obstructing the direct path between the mic and the instrument.”
  —  Owsinski, p. 150.

To this, consider adding #5: a ‘near-coincident’ pair—two cardioid-pattern mics spaced about 15 cm apart horizontally (about as far apart as your ears) and with their axes angling away from each other at about 120 degrees—can improve depth and phasing without adding reverb confusion. You can set this up on a normal mic stand or mic boom with a Sabra Som ST4 Mic Bar or equivalent. Depending on the orientation of the two mics with respect to the instrument, the physical (acoustic) time-delay associated with the 15 cm between them (i.e., between the centers of the two mics’ cardioids) will be as much as 0.5 msec for normal chamber music concert hall sound velocities, room temperatures and humidity levels.

Some might think that adding more mics like this is too complex, too many degrees-of-freedom, too many choices in mixing, too much bother.

But I think it’s not overly complex. And there’s physiology and acoustics underlying a rationale for doing it. The results can be worth the effort if you’ve got the time to do it. In fact, in comparison to so many other aspects of sound engineering that have changed dramatically over the decades, it’s a bit surprising that miking practice has changed so little.

To figure out how ‘near-coincident mic pair’ and other mic array techniques work, it’s useful to consider binaural physiology of hearing—specifically, the psychoacoustical phenomenon known as the ‘precedence effect’. The precedence effect is when reflected signals are neurologically ‘inhibited’ for a period ranging from hundreds of microseconds to a few milliseconds after a direct signal is received by a human listener in a reverberant room.

Multi-microphone digital processing schemes have of course been used for years in connection with adaptive noise canceling (ANC) and other sound engineering techniques to remove noise and reverberation distortion. The individual microphone signals are divided into frequency bands whose corresponding outputs are co-phased (delayed differences are compensated) and summed. The gain of each band is set according to the degree of correlation between microphone signals in that band. ANC operations are equivalent to a time-varying linear filter whose properties depend on the short-term spectra of the two (or more) input channels. This approach can help improve coloration (early echoes that contribute spectral distortion) and reverberant tails (late echoes). But ANC isn’t what I’m talking about.

Human binaural hearing’s ability to localize a sound when there are delayed reflections of the original sound that interfere with the localization process has been termed the ‘precedence effect’ or the ‘first wavefront’ effect. The precedence effect is how human binaural hearing tends to base the judgments of localization and pitch predominantly on inter-aural cues carried by earlier, direct sound—and it contributes quite a bit to our perception of the depth and timbre of stringed instruments’ sounds. In general, the precedence effect affects pairs of coherent acoustic wavefronts that differ in arrival time at the ear by from less than 1 millisecond up to about 10 milliseconds. Conventional wisdom is that the precedence effect arises because of both ipsilateral (same-side) and contralateral (opposite-sides) neural inhibition in the conduction pathways for each ear. Colburn and Durlach (1978) gave a good, early summary of this.

Sayers and Cherry (1957) were among the first to quantitatively describe binaural hearing directly in terms of interaural correlation in terms of a running crosscorrelation function:

where x_l and x_r are the left and right signals respectively and τ is the time delay between the signals at time t.

Lindemann also used a model of binaural hearing based on a running crosscorrelation function. Lindemann’s model, which provides a quantitative basis for the precendence effect, proposed two different criteria that are associated with accurately perceiving the lateral displacement of auditory events: location of the centroid, and location of the maximum. These criteria both relied on the information in the running inhibited crosscorrelation function Ψ.

While violin and other string sounds contain continuous excitations, they aren’t flute-like; they aren’t uniform excitation of pure sinusoids—which is why somewhat esoteric miking techniques might be helpful for strings but offer no noticeable advantage for other instruments.

Basically, I suggest that the natural correlation and inhibition mechanism can be profitably leveraged by thoughtfully placing ‘near-coincident’ dual mics, to supplement the more conventional schemes described in the blockquote above. Use your normal mics just as you routinely do. But add a ‘near-coincident’ dual-mic pair as well. For recording, the dual-mic signals should ideally be sampled at high KHz rates, to be consistent with capturing the sub-millisecond precedence effect.

(In terms of post-processing and mixing, a set of parallel independent delay lines with a 0.5 millisec-or-better resolution of delay times may be helpful to tweak the high-bandwidth-sampled multi-mic signals—but I have not experimented with that myself.)

Just a thought… Try it and see what you think. Happy New Year.

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