Abstract

The effect of mouthpiece design on slurred transients in brass instruments
John Chick; Shona Logie; Lisa Norman; Stefan Bilbao; Murray Campbell

For a musician the choice of a specific instrument is almost always some sort of compromise. The player will be assessing the timbral qualities, intonation and response in different registers and at different dynamic levels, and the ease with which the player can slur between notes is normally one of the key response characteristics used in this assessment. The mouthpiece is known to be highly significant in determining how the instrument plays but it is not clear what its effects are on slurring between notes. The research presented here uses a combination of experimental data from player tests, and recently developed time domain models, to investigate the effect of mouthpiece design parameters on slurred transients.