Interesting experiment!
However there is a occaional give-away:
one can often identify gut by its dodgy intonation.
RT
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Samson" <[email protected]>
To: "Christopher Wilke" <[email protected]>;
<[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2011 12:13 PM
Subject: [BAROQUE-LUTE] Re: Bocquet vids
You know, I wonder about the use of synthetic strings vs gut.
Certainly a player can feel the difference in his/her fingers, but I'm
not convinced that the listener can identify the string material by
hearing a performance. The same (IMHO) goes for lots of things that
are thought to affect the sound of the lute - the shape of the
body, the material of the back. These things may indeed have an
effect, perhaps psychological, on the way the musician plays the
instrument, but what the audience hears is mostly what the musician
puts into the playing, not the details of the instrument itself.
Some years ago, at a Lute Society Summer School, Chris Wilson performed
an experiment. He played the same pieces on four very different lutes
(different makers, some Venetian shape, some Bologna shape, all at the
same pitch) to a blindfolded audience of lutenists, and asked them to
write on a piece of paper which instrument they thought they were
hearing. The results were quite random, with the exception of one
instrument that had octave tuning right up to the fourth course - and
even then some listeners couldn't identify it. Chris, naturally, said
that the instruments felt very different to him as a player, but what
the audeince heard was Chris, and the lutes used weren't of great
significance.
Bill
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