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Comment Re:TFA/Summary written by non-musician... (Score 1) 136

Indeed, you are entirely correct, and I am well aware of this fact (I have spent a couple of enjoyable afternoons at the http://www.rathtrombones.com/ factory...). In defence of the author of the article, they have written "more closely", which I think is reasonable. The tool was also intended for use by modern manufacturers to refine good instruments; as you point out, modern instrument design is becoming ever more customised to the specific needs of the individual player, so a tool to help the designers will inevitably be used for "catering more closely". The statement is true, if you read it from a journalist's point of view.

Comment Some responses (Score 1) 136

Greetings. I am the developer of the software referred to in this article, and the underlying techniques. The discussion on this page has been of considerable interest and value, and I would like to answer a few of the queries it has raised. 1) None of us thought that Bach used the same instrument as the Romans did, as the article suggested. This conclusion could, however, have been reached with 5 minutes, google, and not a great deal of thought. 2) The object of the project was a single musical performance, a recording of which you have heard. Music exists to communicate and evoke emotion, and it's pretty hard for a performance to 'be proven wrong'. The musicians wanted to communicate the most authentic performance possible, well knowing that a truly 'authentic' (whatever that means) performance was impossible. They commissioned us to design them an instrument to their (broad) specifications, and make it as playable as we could. This we did, and they built the result and played it for their performance - and by doing so they achieved their objective, however authentic or otherwise the result. 3) The instrument is an educated guess at what a Lituus looked and sounded like, and that alone is an interesting and thought-provoking object. Best-guesses at things that no longer exist are quite popular in academia - history, paleontology etc. The guesses aren't always right, but we still end up knowing and understanding more than we did before, and that makes it worthwhile. 4) The performance recorded is clearly not perfect. I haven't played the Lituus yet, but I expect it is very difficult to play. For a start, it has no valves/slides, and is restricted to a harmonic series; the player changes notes by lip control alone. It probably doesn't respond terribly well - I've played other historic brass instruments which were very unwieldy compared to their modern equivalents. Instruments have come a long way since Bach's time - as you've correctly pointed out, they are extinct for a reason. The players hadn't had much time to get used to the instruments. Frankly, if they gave a flawless performance under the circumstances, I'd have been very impressed. Even recordings on period instruments by established period-ensembles are not perfectly in tune by modern standards. 5) I completely agree that further work by craftsmen would enhance the instrument. The software was developed as a tool to help designers/manufacturers, never to replace them. In this case, building a workable Lituus without the computer assistance would require building and discarding many instruments in a long and expensive trial-and-error process; the software allowed them to skip straight to a working model. Further tweaking would almost certainly help. Experimenting with mouthpieces also would - these are much harder to model accurately, because the motion of the lips is so complex. The judgement of the musicians is paramount, and technology, however powerful it is, can only ever make helpful suggestions. 6) In principle, combining a model with an optimisation algorithm, a shape parameterisation, some physical constraints, and an objective function, is not revolutionary. That is not to say that it hasn't been done for brass instruments before (at least with this level of success), and it is not to say that there aren't a lot of domain-specific problems to overcome. Revolutionary it may not be, but I promise you it wasn't trivial! I found this a fascinating subject to work on, because it is using hard science to help create instruments, which are then used to make music, which exists to communicate feeling. It is not often that scientists get to work on a project where the ultimate goal is something as transitory, subjective, and human as a musical performance to be experienced only by the players and their audience.

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