Abstract
Bowing is the fundamental motor action responsible for sound production in violin playing. A lot of effort is required to control such a complex technique, especially at the beginning of violin training, also due to a lack of quantitative assessments of bowing movements. Here, we present magneto-inertial measurement units (MIMUs) and an optical sensor interface for the real-time monitoring of the fundamental parameters of bowing. Two MIMUs and a sound recorder were used to estimate the bow orientation and acquire sounds. An optical motion capture system was used as the gold standard for comparison. Four optical sensors positioned on the bow stick measured the stick–hair distance. During a pilot test, a musician was asked to perform strokes using different sections of the bow at different paces. Distance data were used to train two classifiers, a linear discriminant (LD) classifier and a decision tree (DT) classifier, to estimate the bow section used. The DT classifier reached the best classification accuracy (94.2%). Larger data analysis on nine violin beginners showed that the orientation error was less than 2°; the bow tilt correlated with the audio information . The results confirmed that the interface provides reliable information on the bowing technique that might improve the learning performance of violin beginners.
Highlights
A violin is one of the most complex musical instruments to learn
Despite the different methods that are adopted to teach the violin, it is common to start training the fundamentals of bowing techniques with a series of basic exercises focused on elementary motor skills
During the first year of training, violin beginners learn to control two fundamental parameters of the bowing technique that strongly affect the quality of the sound produced: the orientation of the bow with respect to the violin body and the contact point between the bow and the string
Summary
A violin is one of the most complex musical instruments to learn. Since producing pleasant sounds is a hard task that requires a precise model of the instrument to properly interact with it, the initial phase of training is not rewarding for practitioners in terms of auditory feedback. The first year of study is almost entirely dedicated to learning how to perform bowing on open strings (i.e., without pressing strings on the neck with the left hand) in a natural, fluid, and smooth way. Such bowing gestures require the development of precise sensorimotor control both in time and space domains. It has been estimated that 10,000 h of training is needed to bring fine sensorimotor control to a professional level [1]
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