Acoustics & Music Theory
why it sounds like that
Concept

Pizzicato — where it appears

Playing a bowed string by plucking it, which gives a note with a sharp attack and a short decay instead of a held tone. In an ensemble its identity rests on those first moments, so what a hall or a held partner does to them decides whether it stays a pluck.

Named by 2 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A section whose upper partials beam keeps its pizzicato deep into a hall on its axis, and loses it faster than an unpointing one a little way off. The margin at the strike for a pizzicato section of twelve over a held clarinet, 15 m into a hall, from C4 to F♯5, with each partial's direct sound scaled as from a piston of 10 cm radius. Above zero the pluck owns the note. no beam: A♭4 to C♯5 -0.3, -1.7, -3.4, -3.5, -3.3, -1.7; on the axis: A♭4 to C♯5 5.2, 4.1, 2.8, 3.0, 3.5, 5.3; 15° off: A♭4 to C♯5 4.4, 3.2, 1.8, 1.8, 2.2, 3.9; 30° off: A♭4 to C♯5 1.9, 0.3, -1.6, -2.2, -5.1, -2.1.

A section keeps its pizzicato only inside a cone

In a hall a section's pizzicato loses its corpus notes to a held clarinet within two metres, on the assumption that a violin radiates equally in every direction. It does not, and twelve players sharing a beam cannot average it away. Directly on the players' axis, the same section keeps every note for twenty-five metres. Thirty degrees off, with the beam's upper partials thrown elsewhere, it is worse than if it had never pointed. A question about how far back a pizzicato carries turns out to be a question about which way the listener's seat faces.

timbre · Spectrum Antiphonal second violins own their worst pizzicato note almost nowhere, unless a hard wall stands close behind them. A plan of a 24 by 36 m hall with the second violins at the right of the stage, plates turned away from the audience, and a perfectly reflecting wall 2 m behind them. A seat is shaded if the section's worst note from A♭4 to C♯5 stays a pizzicato rather than a clarinet with a click. The seconds keep 30 per cent of seats, the firsts on the other side 30.

A wall puts antiphonal seconds back beside the firsts

Second violins seated opposite the firsts have their plates turned away from the audience, and in a hall a section's pizzicato depends on its beam. With nothing behind them they keep their worst note in about one seat in a hundred. A perfectly hard wall two metres behind gives them back a cone as large as the firsts' own, but a wall that loses three decibels takes most of it away again. And the seats that cone serves turn out to be, within a seat or two, the seats the same section would serve sitting beside the firsts.

timbre · Spectrum

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

DirectivityReverberationTimbreCritical distanceSpectral envelope

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