Measures of Facial Muscle Activation, Intra-oral Pressure and Mouthpiece Force in Trumpet Playing

Abstract

Trumpet performance builds on the synergy of multiple factors. From a physiological point of view, the production of a simple musical tone relies on the control of the pressure at the lips, the contact force on the mouthpiece, and the oral articulatory gestures and configurations. Whereas previous studies described the magnitude of these control parameters in the quasi-static regime of the oscillation, the present investigation focuses on their temporal evolution and interrelation. Intra-oral pressure, mouthpiece force, facial muscular activity of two groups of muscles, and the radiated sound were recorded from three professional players performing isolated and articulated tones with three different dynamics. Results showed that the experimental conditions affected the amount and location of variability in the performance, and the behaviour of intra-oral pressure at note initiation. All together, this suggests that different dynamics and sequencing may cause a reorganization of the mechanisms underlying the production of a tone.

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Short-Term Scientific Mission program of the COST Action IC0601 on Sonic Interaction Design.

Notes

¹The term mouthpiece force here specifies the contact force between the lips and the mouthpiece, controlled by the strength of the arms holding the instrument (as sketched in Figure 1(b)); this variable is also called mouthpiece pressure in other literature (Farkas, 1962).

²IRCAM UPMC-CNRS, Paris, France, and Music Research Department, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Canada.

³Bertsch actually uses the term embouchure pressure to indicate this same variable.

⁴Placement of the lips, facial muscles, and jaw during wind instrument playing (Rande, 2003).

⁵According to technical data-sheet, this sensor delivers a sensitivity of 6 mV psi⁻¹, calibrated for span to within ±1%, maximal combined pressure non-linearity, pressure hysteresis of ±0.5%, and response time of 100 μs.

⁶Concatenated here means repeated notes with minimal duty cycle, where the latter defines the percent time during which the tone is active relative to the inter onset interval (this is expressed with the term KDT in midi-like terminology (Bresin, 2001)).

⁷Tubes were of slightly different lengths, and an increase of 1 cm caused a shift in the frequency resonance of +25 Hz.

⁸Matlab(R) toolbox courtesy of Genesis Acoustics, http://www.genesis-acoustics.com

⁹It is normally accepted that if the p-value is smaller than 0.05, then the results obtained are statistically significant. That is, one can state with 99.95% certainty that the means of the groups are significantly different (Karris, 2003; Dodge, 2008).

¹⁰F-statistic with both degrees of freedom, and p-value computed by the R function aov for the null-hypothesis test (Type I sequential Sum of Squares).

¹¹The tense posture of the lips used for the embouchure formation.