ESMAE - Departamento de Música
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- Relationships between subjective and objective acoustical measures in churchesPublication . Carvalho, António P. O.; Morgado, António E. J.; Henrique, LuísThis study reports on subjective and objective acoustical field measurements made in a survey of 36 Catholic churches in Portugal built in the last 14 centuries. Monaural acoustical measurements (RT, EDT, C80, D50, TS, and L) were taken at several source/receiver locations in each church and a group of college students was asked to judge the subjective quality of music. The listeners in each church evaluated live music performances at similar locations in each room. Evaluation sheets were used to record the listeners’ overall impressions of room acoustics qualities and also Loudness, Reverberance, Intimacy, Envelopment, Directionality, Balance, Clarity, Echoes, and Background Noise. This paper complements the one presented at the Indianapolis ASA Meeting (May 1996) and concentrates on the relationships of the subjective parameters with the objective room acoustics measures and with the architectural features of the churches. The results are graphed and analyzed by comparisons. Correlation analyses and statistical modeling identified significant relationships among the measures. For instance, linear correlation coefficients (R) of 0.8-0.9 were found for the relationships: Reverberance/RT and Clarity/C80; the maximum R found was 0.93 for Echoes/RT. Regarding architectural features the maximum R found was 0.87 between Intimacy and Total Volume.
- Analysis of subjective acoustic measures and speech intelligibility in portuguese churchesPublication . Carvalho, António P. O.; Morgado, António E. J.; Henrique, LuísThis study reports on subjective acoustical field measurements made in a survey of 36 Catholic churches in Portugal built in the last 14 centuries. The same group of college students were asked to judge the quality of speech and music at all the churches. Two sets of listeners in each church evaluated live music performance (cello and oboe) at two similar locations in each of the rooms using a seven-point semantic differential rating scale. An acoustical evaluation sheet was used to measure listeners overall impression of room acoustics qualities, and each of the factors that can contribute to that perception as loudness, reverberance, intimacy, envelopment, directionality, balance, clarity, echoes and background noise. Speech intelligibility tests were also given to the same group in each church. One-hundred-word lists were used in live speech tests using a theater college student as speaker. The results are graphed and analyzed by comparisons. Variations of subjective and speech intelligibility qualities were identified among the different churches and within each of the churches as well. The subjective qualities that contributed to overall acoustical impression were also identified.
- Do pianists play with their teeth?Publication . Lourenço da Fonseca, Sofia; Clemente, Miguel Pais; Coimbra, Daniela; Barbosa, Álvaro; Pinho, João CarlosThe aim of this study was to find out whether the masticatory and postural muscles are used by pianists during their music performances. The study also aimed to ascertain whether the complex neuromuscular activity involved in the act of playing the piano also encourages hyperactivity in terms of the masticatory muscles. The bio-electric potentials of the masticatory and postural muscles of 20 pianists were recorded. The electromyographical figures obtained from regarding the temporal and masseter muscles are much higher than those recorded when in the resting position. These registrations, which are not the same as those obtained, for example, when the individuals are chewing hard food such as a carrot, are nonetheless indicative of daily parafunctional activity in musicians who often study for as much as 7 hours per day.
- European Piano Schools: Russian, German and French classical piano interpretation and techniquePublication . Lourenço da Fonseca, SofiaThe goal of this research is to characterize representative performances by famous pianists in order to determine main influential trends in performance, derived specifically from traditional piano practices referred to as National Piano Schools. Previous research (Lourenço, 2005, 2007) has shown strong musical correlation of particular characteristics, namely the aesthetic, the technical, the historic and the repertoire. The concept of piano interpretation school is a useful concept for analyzing the universe of piano performance. Piano pedagogy literature of each European National Piano School has been analyzed together with an empirical audio analysis of recordings through a check-list survey. Overall the main National Piano Schools consist of three essential branches: the Russian school; the German school; the French school. The identification of National Piano Schools provides a powerful framework of study and an awareness of Europe’s elusive music heritage and it main influences. Furthermore, as pianists use their whole body to enhance their communication of the music’s spiritual, emotional and dramatic essence, this study also aims to contribute into research on performance practice.
- The assessment of trapezius muscle symptoms of piano players by the use of infrared thermographyPublication . Lourenço da Fonseca, Sofia; Clemente, Miguel Pais; Coimbra, Daniela; Silva, António; Gabriel, Joaquim; Pinho, João CarlosThe aim of this study is to understand the correlation of trapezius muscle symptoms in piano players during their performance. The association of piano practice and the general health of a pianist, especially concerning the musculoskeletal system, and head posture has been studied in relation to orofacial anatomic zones and is presumed to have an influence on the biomechanical behavior of the cranio-cervico-mandibular complex (CCMC). Previous research has found that the act of playing piano involves a complex neuromuscular activity with hyperactivity of the masticatory muscles and the postural muscle trapezius. Thermal image assessment was made to the pianist’s CCMC while the piano player was playing his/her piece.
- Antagonism and mutual dependency. Critial models of performance and “Piano Interpretation Schools”Publication . Cruz, Rui; Lourenço da Fonseca, SofiaTo polarize and, coincidently, intersect two different concepts, in terms of a distinction/analogy between “piano interpretation schools” and “critical models” is the aim of this paper. The former, with its prior connotations of both empiricism and dogmatism and not directly shaped by aesthetic criteria or interpretational ideals, depends mainly on the aural and oral tradition as well the teacher-student legacy; the latter employs ideally the generic criteria of interpretativeness, which can be measured in accordance to an aesthetic formula and can include features such as non-obviousness, inferentially, lack of consensus, concern with meaning or significance, concern with structure or design, etc. The relative autonomy of the former is a challenge to the latter, which embraces the range of perspectives available in the horizon of the history of ideas about music and interpretation. The effort of recognizing models of criticism within musical interpretation creates the vehicle for new understandings of the nature and the historical development of Western classical piano performance, promoting also the production of quality critical argument and the communication of key performance tendencies and styles.
- The creative process behind Dialogismos I: theoretical and technical considerationsPublication . Bernardes, Gilberto; Pinho, Nuno Peixoto de; Lourenço da Fonseca, Sofia; Carlos Guedes; Pennycook, Bruce; Oña, ErickThis paper examines the aesthetic dimension and the technical realization of Dialogismos I, a piece for saxophone alto and electronics by the composer Nuno Peixoto de Pinho. The conceptual basis of the work relies on the notion of ‘intertextuality’ coined by the Bulgarian-French philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva, which was somehow transposed to the music domain by J. Peter Burkholder under the concept ‘musical borrowing’. The compositional problems raised by applying an intertextual musical thinking as a key driver of the composition were solved using two different approaches. The first approach was the manual selection of elements from several music works with different granularities to devise the overall structure of the work and to create the saxophone score. The second approach was applied to the realization of the electronic part and relied on concatenative sound synthesis as an algorithmic computer assisted composition method and a real-time synthesis technique.
- Cem anos da arte do piano: os pianistas na sociedade de concertos Orpheon Portuense (1886-2008)Publication . Lourenço da Fonseca, Sofia
- Towards a multimodal analysis of European Piano Schools of Music PerformancePublication . Lourenço da Fonseca, Sofia; Martins, Luís G.; Wanderley, Marcelo; Titts, Mickael; Megre, RicardoThis study aims to characterize representative performances by experienced pianists in order to determine main influential trends in performance, derived specifically from traditional piano practices referred to as National Piano Schools. The methodology of this exploratory study departs from a musicological empirical analysis in articulation with recent technological developments for metric methods. It allowed an analysis of gesture and musical semantics by applying a multimodal approach for capturing the pianist performance based on the extraction of features’ sets specifically targeted to each piano school. In this paper we describe the quantitative analysis approach based on motion capture.
- Jean Claude Risset’s Duet for One Pianist: Challenges of a Real-Time Performance Interaction with a Computer-Controlled Acoustic Piano 16 Years LaterPublication . Lourenço da Fonseca, SofiaThis study aims to discuss the work Duet for one Pianist (1989) by the French composer Jean-Claude Risset (b. 13 March 1938) by analyzing the challenges of the music performance of this Computer-Aided Composition work Disklavier and implies HumanComputer Interaction performance. Extremely honored to perform the revised version of the 8 Sketches for One Pianist and Disklavier within a research project of CITAR and a new Sketch Reflections (2012) by Jean-Claude Risset dedicated to me in a World premiere in the closing ceremony of Black&White 2012 Film Festival promoted by the Catholic University of Portugal. Several issues on the performance of this work are analysed as a casestudy, from the point of view of the performer, particularly the components of expressive performance in a real-time interaction between performer and computer. These components can work as analysis criteria of a piano interpretation, in here, of a pianist and Disklavier interpretation.