jerming

Username: jerming

Participant details

	Network Member	Jer-Ming Chen
	Organisation/Institution	University of New South Wales
	Department/Centre	School of Physics
	Lab	Music Acoustics
	Website	http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/music/
	Research area	Music Perception and Production Music Acoustics Acoustic Science
	Research keywords	woodwinds, vocal tract, resonance tuning

Research Interests

Why do performers sound different even though they are playing the same instrument? What differentiates a good musician from a poor one? In the context of wind instruments, one of the clues is to look at the contribution of the player’s vocal tract. Saxophonist and clarinettists can produce an extraordinary range of sounds and musical effects. I'm interested in how saxophonists and clarinettists adjust their vocal tract to acoustically interact with and influence the behaviour of the instrument to elicit spectacular performance effects such as bugling, altissimo playing, pitch bending and even multiphonics. Using specially modified mouthpieces, we are able to measure the acoustics of the player's vocal tract during performance, without disturbing the player. This allows us to understand the acoustic mechanisms that the player manipulates [intuitively] in their vocal tract, and consequently understand how these advanced techniques are produced.

Representative Publications

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5864/776?ijkey=jIXC/xH6hwYS2&keytype=ref&siteid=sci

http://www.acoustics.org/press/155th/chen.htm

Member for: 5 years 6 months 4 weeks 1 days