Acoustic signature of violins based on bridge transfer mobility measurements

This paper is an attempt to solve two problems related to musical acoustics. The first one consists in defining a signature of an instrument, namely, summarizing its vibroacoustical behavior. The second one deals with the existing relationship between the musical sound and the vibroacoustic properties of the instrument body. The violin is the application of this paper. A proposed solution for the first problem consists in an estimation of the bridge transfer mobility and the mean-value of the lateral bridge transfer mobility. The second problem is studied via the comparison between the amplitudes of harmonics, extracted from a glissando audio signal, and the lateral bridge transfer mobility: Both curves exhibit similar features. This is the main result of the paper. This is evidenced by studying the effect of a violin mute on both the lateral bridge transfer mobility and the produced sound. Finally, this is evidenced by successfully identifying which violin is played in an audio recording, using the computation of the Pearson distance between the distribution of the amplitude of harmonics and a database of measured mobilities.