>From Michael Wathen: >>What do [you] feel, intuitively, is the <audible> difference between the tone produced by a hard blow and that produced by a soft blow. ... I will start with what I think is the difference.....<< >>A hard blow produces a strong attack that is several times louder in comparison with the tone that immediately follows. A soft blow will produce a many times much smaller attack than the hard blow relative to the tone that follows the attack. Also, the softer blow does not last as long as the tone of the hard blow because the it was not given as much energy as the hard blow.<< ----------------------- I'm sure there are some subjective elements to the perception of "loudness" at the attack, but there are also some objective things. Because the hammer is compressed more by the harder blow, it acts stiffer than at the soft blow, rebounds more quickly from the string, and therefore produces more high partials. My understanding of this is that the brighter tone (greater high partial content) makes the tone sound like it has a stronger attack, and the fact that higher partials die out more quickly than the lower partials present in both pp and ff accounts for the different proportion of "attack" tone to "sustain" tone. The situation you describe can also be altered by voicing the hammer to have a more or less linear response curve. That is, by altering the stiffness gradient in the felt, the "attack" sound can be made much more (or less) similar between pp and ff. Greetings and Hallucinations, Bob Davis
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