The new millennium is now opening and this story can be dated back to 1 millennium ago in 980-1050 when Guido d'Arezzo at Pomposa Abbey near Ferrara invented the "Guidonian hand" as a didactic help for singers in order they were allowed to chant notes at right intonation in the medieval musical practice of "solmisazione". The left hand is usually represented in iconographic pictures marked with the first syllable of each verse of the popular St. John hymn that served as a mnemonic tool for the tuning of the hexachord. Similarly nowadays in acoustics some expedient of this kind is known from the literature: the Smith calculator, for instance, helping in finding the unknown load impedance of a transmission line by using a proper geometrical model for it. Recently the author was enchanted when discovering that the whole set of the more important time-average sound energetic parameters show a geometrical relationship among them and then started to think about the possibility of using such a representation for synthetically describe the energetic status of a sound event. This paper briefly reports about the construction and acoustical meaning of this geometric device that has been called the "sound energy compass".
From Guidonian hand to sound energy compass
Domenico Stanzial
2005
Abstract
The new millennium is now opening and this story can be dated back to 1 millennium ago in 980-1050 when Guido d'Arezzo at Pomposa Abbey near Ferrara invented the "Guidonian hand" as a didactic help for singers in order they were allowed to chant notes at right intonation in the medieval musical practice of "solmisazione". The left hand is usually represented in iconographic pictures marked with the first syllable of each verse of the popular St. John hymn that served as a mnemonic tool for the tuning of the hexachord. Similarly nowadays in acoustics some expedient of this kind is known from the literature: the Smith calculator, for instance, helping in finding the unknown load impedance of a transmission line by using a proper geometrical model for it. Recently the author was enchanted when discovering that the whole set of the more important time-average sound energetic parameters show a geometrical relationship among them and then started to think about the possibility of using such a representation for synthetically describe the energetic status of a sound event. This paper briefly reports about the construction and acoustical meaning of this geometric device that has been called the "sound energy compass".I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
