ABSTRACT
Studying the quality of musical instruments, as it is perceived by musicians, is particularly interesting to help their development and to take into account musicians’ desires. Two kinds of studies can be carried out on musical instruments:
- Subjective studies, where the quality is assessed by listeners or players during evaluation tests. It is necessary for these kinds of tests to finely control the design parameters of the instrument, to check the reliability of the evaluations, and define how to deal with inter-individual differences.
- Objective studies, characterized by physical measurements of the instruments (e.g. input impedance measurements of brasses).
In order to understand and help the design of musical instruments, it is very interesting to study relationships between these two assessments. We will illustrate the presentation with studies concerning the trumpet and the quality of saxophone reeds.
Concerning the trumpet, we will present the main results we obtained and the different devices we developed (artificial mouths, parameterized mouthpiece, parameterized leadpipe, simulation by physical modeling).
Concerning the reeds, we will present different experimental protocols for the subjective assessment (free choice profiling, pairwise comparisons) and the different objective measurements we carried out (in vivo measurements on the musician, measurements based on the signal of the sounds, measurements based on the mechanical response of the reed).
ABOUT JEAN-FRANÇOIS PETIOT
Dr. Jean-François PETIOT is Professor of Engineering Design at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes (ECN), France (http://www.irccyn.ec-nantes.fr/~petiot/).
He received a M.Sc (1988) in mechanics (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan), and a PhD (1993) in mechanical engineering (Ecole Centrale de Nantes). He is faculty member of Ecole Centrale Nantes since 1993.
After his tenure in 2004, he served as department chair at ECN (Products Engineering and Industrial Systems Development Department). He is currently Supervisor of the specialization “Industrial Design, Marketing and Innovation” and head of the research team IS3P “System engineering, Products, Performances, Perceptions” of the IRCCyN laboratory (UMR CNRS 6597). He teaches Design Methodology, Human Factors in Systems Design and Physics of musical instruments at Ecole Centrale de Nantes.
His research activities are centered on customer oriented design. They concern the development of tools and methods for taking into account the perceptions and integrating human factors in the design process. Musician and arranger (leader of the Nantes University Jazz orchestra), he has also a deep interest for applications in acoustics and in musical acoustics.