Re: [LAU] [New music]: Kisses don't lie, a ballad

jonetsu <jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com> writes: To add some data point from a marginally related field: I am playing accordion and also have a first generation Roland FR-1b digital accordion. The latter is bellows pressure sensitive but it's hard finding any sensitivity setting that is satisfactory: changes in pressure do too little, and on the little that they do, they do too much. Basically working with bellows pressure feels like fiddling with a volume dial: _only_ loudness changes. Now that's not entirely correct since we are talking about multisamples here, but it feels like that in comparison. On an acoustic instrument, the sound is determined by chopping an air stream into pieces with a metal reed vibrating through a reed gap in the aluminum reed plate and powered by the air stream. The amount of air an accordion will let through is limited so the resistance grows with the pressure. Volume is proportional to the amount of air going through, but the overtone content changes with the amplitude of the reed which follows pressure more leasurely the lower the reed gets. Also as pressure increases, multiple reeds sounding at once for each note get phase-locked tighter. So something happens and you can unfurl a tone or even a chord and the whole tonal and balance between pitches changes with pressure. The result is that you play around a lot with intensity while the accompanying loudness contributes less than one would expect to the overall change in character and tone. At least in the comparatively early digital accordion model I possess, this characteristic of an acoustic instrument is reflected in a manner I find less than satisfactory. And I find part of that lies with too much of expressive changes getting reflected in mere loudness rather than something feeling like tonal intensity. -- David Kastrup