Concertina Sounds Travel Further Than String Instruments... Why?

[Jody Kruskal]

Last summer I was at an old-time music festival with outdoor sessions. It was mentioned to me that my concertina carried farther than the string instruments I was playing with. That is, up close to the session where I was playing, the concertina sounded like it was playing at about the same volume as the other instruments but from 30 feet away the concertina was the loudest by far in the mix. There happened to be another concertina player there so I was able to confirm this with my own ears.

What is it about the concertina sound that does that?

I can only guess. Perhaps it's the envelope, the shape of each note as the instrument is played. When looking at a concertina sound file in an editor like Audacity, I see the volume start up fast and end fast for each note in a single note passage. The volume drops to nearly zero between notes. Each one looks like a discrete round ball and they all look very much alike like a string of pearls. The fiddle and guitar notes look much different, more squiggly and fuzzy and have a complex variety of shapes.

At high magnifiaction, the concertina sound waves look very smooth and regular. The string instruments have jagged messy looking waves.

Might these two factors be a visual manifestation of the quality that gives the concertina such carrying power over long distances?

Edited March 6, 2014 by Jody Kruskal

[Terry McGee]

Directionality (of the instruments) might be a big issue here. Fiddles beam a lot of their energy at right angles to the belly (it's what's heaving up and down after all), which can mean a lot of it is "Lost in Space" in an outdoor setting*. As we know, concertinas tend to blast their energy out the ends (try recording with a mic at one end only to confirm this). So the energy spread is more horizontal (assuming the concertina player is still vertical).

 

Which means you'd think that, at a distance, one might expect to hear one side of the concertina well, and the other side poorly (depending on rotation). But perhaps enough energy bounces off other things to avoid that? Indeed, maybe that's what fiddle players are for - to reflect concertina sound to distant listeners?

 

*Also good to remember that when ET comes to complain about the noise, you can just point to the fiddle players.

 

Terry

[JimLucas]

Last summer I was at an old-time music festival with outdoor sessions. It was mentioned to me that my concertina carried farther than the string instruments I was playing with. That is, up close to the session where I was playing, the concertina sounded like it was playing at about the same volume as the other instruments but from 30 feet away the concertina was the loudest by far in the mix. There happened to be another concertina player there so I was able to confirm this with my own ears.

I first noticed this effect many years ago, at the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm. With a large, relatively steep slope there was a dance (square/contra, not that it matters) in progress at the bottom of the hill. The pickup band consisted of numerous fiddles, a couple of guitars, at least one banjo, flutes and whistles, at least a couple of accordions, and one concertina. Down next to the band, the concertina was totally indistinguishable (well, unless I stood right next to it), but when I reached the top of the hill, it was the only instrument I could hear.

 

What is it about the concertina sound that does that?

My tongue-in-cheek thought was that though fiddles aren't quite the same as harps, maybe the angels prefer string music in general and so suck up all of their sound into the heavens. But that doesn't explain the disappearance of the accordions in my own example. Or would that be vertical suction in the other direction? (Thank you, Gary Larsen. )

 

I can only guess. Perhaps it's the envelope, the shape of each note as the instrument is played. When looking at a concertina sound file in an editor like Audacity, I see the volume start up fast and end fast for each note in a single note passage. The volume drops to nearly zero between notes. Each one looks like a discrete round ball and they all look very much alike like a string of pearls. The fiddle and guitar notes look much different, more squiggly and fuzzy and have a complex variety of shapes.

 

At high magnifiaction, the concertina sound waves look very smooth and regular. The string instruments have jagged messy looking waves.

 

Might these two factors be a visual manifestation of the quality that gives the concertina such carrying power over long distances?

Or might it have something to do with the characteristics Terry mentions in another thread:

It's useful, when dealing with musical instrument spectra to look separately at the lower partials, which are often of similar or even increasing amplitude (loudness), and the higher partials, which are usually of decreasing loudness.

 

...

(Click on the icon at the far right of the top of the quote box to see Terry's full post, including a spectral image.)

[Jim Besser]

I"m not a technical person, but I believe it is the purity of the tone, the lack of overtones.

 

Stringed instruments are very overtoney, which is a crude way of saying what you said: "At high magnifiaction, the concertina sound waves look very smooth and regular. The string instruments have jagged messy looking waves."

 

Years ago, sitting outside a London Ont. pub, another musician and I were playing our G/Ds. His - a Jeffries; mine, at the time - a hybrid, with accordion reeds.

 

Sitting at the table, mine seemed significantly louder. But the Jeffries cut through the din much better and was audible from a much greater distance. It was the moment when I realized I wanted a Jeffries.

 

 

[Jim Besser]

Hmmmm. Deleting a duplicated message. Sorry.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Jim Besser

[Mike Franch]

I have a late Aeola (very late, it seems to be the last one of the B&H regime), aluminum frames. In groups, it is a frustratingly quiet player. Nice sound, but not much volume.

 

On nice summer evenings, I'll often sit on my front porch and play. I live in a neighborhood of frame turn-of-the-20th-century houses. They're detached, but on small lots, fairly close together. But still, I've been surprised when neighbors several houses down or across the wide street have said they can hear me. Maybe the porch ceiling acts as a sound board?

 

They also claim to like my playing, which is another surprise.

[Wolf Molkentin]

I"m not a technical person, but I believe it is the purity of the tone, the lack of overtones.

 

Stringed instruments are very overtoney...

 

I guess this is a factor. It's not just the lack of overtones but not having overtones contributing to the overall loudness, isn't it?

[Jim Besser]

 

I"m not a technical person, but I believe it is the purity of the tone, the lack of overtones.

 

Stringed instruments are very overtoney...

I guess this is a factor. It's not just the lack of overtones but not having overtones contributing to the overall loudness, isn't it?

 

 

 

Maybe.

 

What really interests me: why my Morse G/D with accordion reeds clearly sounds louder than my Jeffries when I'm playing it, and to people near me - but the Jeffries is far more audible to my Morris dancers who are busily banging sticks, jingling bells and stirring up street noise.

[DaveM]

Near-field vs. far field considerations may be important in understanding these features:

Note that the wavelengths involved are on the O(1 meter), e.g. middle c is 130cm, so your head is in the near-field regime of the concertina,

if you're right at the edge of the band you're probably in the transition region, but if you're out in the audience (more like O[10meters]) you're in the far field regime.

 

 

<vague physics handwaving>

A small free reed emits waves more like a perfect point-like source (a dipole).

In a concertina, this sound comes out throgh the fretwork which has a linear scale of a few centimeters or so, still much much smaller than the

wavelength of sound produced (except maybe for the uppermost notes of a treble)

Since the sound producing element is effectively point-like, the output is almost exclusively radiates into the far field, like a pure dipole source.

Instruments with larger sound producing units (violins, and esp. guitars in their upper registers) behave as extended sources, and thus could produce more higher order near-field power relative to the

far-field (dipole) signal.

 

Thus, you might expect that a large instrument will have a sharp drop-off in volume across the transition from near-field to far-field, while smaller instruments

will have a more consistent (1/r^2) drop off.

</vague physics handwaving>

Something that is not vague handwaving: you can only get directionality of sound projection if the sound producing element has a size comparable to (or larger than) the wavelength under consideration,
so I'd expect that concertinas have more uniform projection than other common instruments.

 

These types of considerations might have something to do with differences between say concertina and violin, but don't do much to explain why different concertinas seem to have different amounts of projection.

[Steve Mansfield]

Fascinated by all this. At the risk of dragging the discussion off of concertinas, is the same principle of <massive amounts of physics handflapping> wavelengths and drop-offs etc. why my fife carries so well over massed accordion and saxophone reeds?

 

I'd like to play some concertina for the Morris, but the fife cuts through so well that I'm always back to the fife ...

[Wolf Molkentin]

As to the sound of the fife, the term "fullbodied" comes to my mind.

[Clive Thorne]

Well, hello chaps.

 

Not been here for a few years, but stuck in Italy and nothing in English on the telly, so revisiting some old haunts.

 

As mentioned already the traditional concertina tone is very pure (compared to most instruments). A fiddle note is more of a saw tooth, which has a very high harmonic content, i.e. a lot of the volume is contained in frequencies many times that of the fundamental.

 

High notes are absorbed by things far more than low notes are, so as you go further away the fiddle note will loose more of its energy than a concertina note due to those harmonics being lost on the way.

 

Also of course, by the same premise, as you go further away a concertina will still sound pretty much like a concertina, but a fiddle sound less and less like a fiddle. In fact as you move away a fiddle, having lost its harmonics, will probably sound more like a (very quiet) concertina.

 

That's my theory anyway.

Edited March 6, 2014 by Clive Thorne

[Terry McGee]

Hang on one cotton-pickin' minute! Where's this talk of concertinas having a pure tone coming from? Concertina tone is far from pure (in the harmonic sense. No adverse findings in the Bible, so pure enough in the religious sense.).

 

Count the partials in this note played by Chris Ghent:

 

 

 

A pure tone (i.e. a sinewave) has only the fundamental (the left hand peak). A flute in the second octave approaches this (the tone-hole lattice forms an aggressive top-cut filter which takes out higher partials). A flute in the low octave might have several significant harmonics (especially when played in the dark Irish style). But a concertina has a whole picket-fence of partials. I'd say there are nine partials of significant amplitude in the sample above.

 

Indeed, it may well be these significant partials that help carry the instrument's sound to longer distances. As we move away from the outdoor session group, the level drops. As level drops, the bass and top end sounds become less noticeable first, due to selective effects in the human ear. The Fletcher-Munson curves (1933) illustrate this (note though more recent studies have updated their pioneering work).

 

If we go to the bottom of the graph (the threshold of hearing), we see humans are most sensitive in the 2 to 5KHz region, often referred to as the Presence region. Babies have found over the aeons that concentrating their energy around here brings mum back from the campfire quicker.

 

We can see from the concertina note graph that it has plenty of activity in the presence region. That's gotta help.

 

Terry

Edited March 7, 2014 by Terry McGee

[Wolf Molkentin]

You're obviously right, Terry! Back to "start" therefore...

[Jody Kruskal]

Hmmm. Terry I'm sure you are right, but... since you say:

 

 

If we go to the bottom of the graph (the threshold of hearing), we see humans are most sensitive in the 2 to 5KHz region, often referred to as the Presence region. Babies have found over the aeons that concentrating their energy around here brings mum back from the campfire quicker.

We can see from the concertina note graph that it has plenty of activity in the presence region. That's gotta help.

What I see in your delightful graph is that the 2 to 5KHz region has a large dip, getting larger as the volume decreases. Perhaps the little rise at 1500 and 10k has something to do with it?

One interesting thing about playing outside with no structures near is that the sound has little to bounce off of horizonally. There were a few tents and cars and trees about, but nothing substantial except the good earth... and us humans tend to be short so most of the reflection went straight up where there was nobody to hear it.

As you pointed out here Terry, concertinas do shoot the sound out horizontally, so I wonder if that might account for much of this odd effect.

[Wolf Molkentin]

It springs to my mind that the attack might add a significant part to that long-distance loudness and identifiability...

[Terry McGee]

Hmmm. Terry I'm sure you are right, but... since you say:

 

 

If we go to the bottom of the graph (the threshold of hearing), we see humans are most sensitive in the 2 to 5KHz region, often referred to as the Presence region. Babies have found over the aeons that concentrating their energy around here brings mum back from the campfire quicker.

We can see from the concertina note graph that it has plenty of activity in the presence region. That's gotta help.

 

What I see in your delightful graph is that the 2 to 5KHz region has a large dip, getting larger as the volume decreases. Perhaps the little rise at 1500 and 10k has something to do with it?

 

One interesting thing about playing outside with no structures near is that the sound has little to bounce off of horizonally. There were a few tents and cars and trees about, but nothing substantial except the good earth... and us humans tend to be short so most of the reflection went straight up where there was nobody to hear it.

 

As you pointed out here Terry, concertinas do shoot the sound out horizontally, so I wonder if that might account for much of this odd effect.

 

The lowest line of the Fletcher-Munson graph shows "how much sound energy is needed to be just audible". So that dip between 2 and 5 KHz shows that the least amount of sound is needed between those frequencies, ie that our hearing is most sensitive there. I'll readily admit it's a bit of an upside-down graph!

 

The top end of the graph is interesting too. You'll see at the 100dB SPL level, back in 1933, Fletcher and Munson were prepared to subject their hapless victims to signals up to 15kHz at 100dB Sound Pressure Level (100,000 times higher than the threshold of hearing). The modern researchers in 2003 stopped mercifully at 1KHz.

 

The very top of the graph, 130dB SPL, is about where we start to worry about instantaneous hearing damage. Let's try not to go there!

 

Terry

[Terry McGee]

It springs to my mind that the attack might add a significant part to that long-distance loudness and identifiability...

The attack is certainly an important feature of identifiability, but I wouldn't expect it to affect our perception of loudness. Of course, if you can't identify something, you're not in a good position to estimate how loud it is in a mix of other sounds!

 

Interesting to consider what impacts on the attack of a concertina note. Lots of things, I imagine.