Quality of piano tones under different tone stoppings.

Abstract

Tone stopping is the act of ending the vibration of a piano string by the contact of the damper. This paper studies the perceptual effect of tone stopping. Five performances of a music passage were synthesized with piano tones of simulated tone stopping at sound level, i.e., with the tones that were obtained by processing the waveform of a single, sustained tone of a real piano to induce a desired ending profile with the onset portion kept intact. These performances were rated by ten musically trained subjects with the method of paired comparisons on twenty adjectives. The result indicated that: (1) a short plateau followed by a slow decay made the tone reverberating, lustrous, and beautiful, (2) a long plateau followed by a fast decay made the tone sticky, immature, and blunt, and (3) a short plateau followed by a fast decay made the tone tight, sharp, and nimble.