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# Towards constructing a historically-grounded gesture-timbre space of Guqin playing techniques

Han Han, Cixian Lu

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## To cite this version:

Han Han, Cixian Lu. Towards constructing a historically-grounded gesture-timbre space of Guqin playing techniques. Timbre 2023, 3rd International Conference on Timbre, Thessaloniki, Greece, Jul 2023, Thessalokini, Greece. hal-04460843

HAL Id: hal-04460843

https://hal.science/hal-04460843v1

Submitted on 15 Feb 2024

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Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Towards constructing a historically-grounded gesture-timbre space of Guqin playing techniques

Han Han*, Cixian Lu+

*Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes (LS2N) han.han@ls2n.fr
+University of Minnesota, School of Music

Affiliation

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LABORATOIRE
DES SCIENCES
DU NUMÉRIQUE
DE NANTES

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Funds and support

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EQUIPE
LUTHERIES
ACOUSTIQUE
MUSIQUE

## Introduction:

Guqin is an ancient (~3000 yo) Chinese zither instrument known for its **timbral variability**. Most of its playing techniques were developed no later than Ming Dynasty (14-16 century). Numerous ancient text dating back to the 900s have provided guidelines for gestures of defined Guqin playing techniques and recommendations on timbre aesthetics.

Nevertheless, a large part of Guqin pedagogies is **metaphoric**, mind instead of body-centered, and include **limited justifications** on recommended gestures.

## Objective:

This work attempts to **digitize and concretize** the sonic implications in Guqin gesture-timbre writings, and variegate within the vocabulary of playing techniques by designing and recording a **dataset of isolated, short representative Guqin timbres labeled by gestural data**.

### The Text: <Tangchenzhuo zhifa> 唐陈拙指法 (est 860~900)

- Chen Zhuo 陈拙 (Late Tang dynasty: mid 9th century)

- Include technical (hand control and tone production) and expressivity (aesthetics of tone) instructions 【诀, 法, 用】 , on three fundamental elements of qin playing 【指, 声, 韵】 : finger, sound, resonance

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## Case Studies:

### How do the gestural degrees of freedom identified for each case affect the resulting timbres?

#### Acoustics-oriented techniques:

- Single note open string

- 指分远近轻重徐急: "For short sounds the finger is positioned on the surface, passing lightly over the string, the attack light and sudden; For long sounds, the finger slowly approaches from far away, goes deep into the string and attacks violently"

- 声分刚柔: "The outward plucking corresponds to firm sounds - clear and far-reaching; the inward plucking corresponds to soft sounds - harmonious and unctuous"

- Single note harmonics

- 徽正则鸣, 徽差则塞: "Sound rings only if finger strikes at precisely the markings, otherwise it will be dampen and stuffy."

- Double note

- How do the two notes fuse under different modes of attacks?

#### Context-dependent techniques:

- Vibrato and portamento

- Resonance: how do force and timing of left hand movement affect the modification of resonance

- Noise:

- noise from nails (right hand attack)

- noise from flesh (left hand portamento/vibrato)

## Feature extraction:

- Gestural: fingers, attack positions, direction, inferred force, left/right hand timing coordination

- Timbral:

- Partials distribution moments: centroid, skewness, kurtosis

- Spectrotemporal modulations: Joint time-frequency scattering Transform (JTFS)

- Noise: Noise-to-harmonics ratio

- Deep embeddings: open3

## Gesture-Timbre Space:

- Multidimensionality scaling: Isomap, TSNE, PCA

- Future: gesture-conditioned timbre synthesis

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## References:

YOU, L.-Y. (2017). *Facture et jeu de la cithare chinoise qin sous la dynastie des Tang*. Université Paris Sorbonne.
Penttinen, H., Pakarinen, J., Välimäki, V., Laurson, M., Li, H.B. & Leman, M. (2006). Model-based sound synthesis of the guqin. *The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America*.
Jiang, K., & Yao, B. (2009). *Tang Dai Chen Zhuo Lun Guqin Zhi Fa* 唐代陈拙论古琴指法
Henbing, L., & Leman, M. (2007). A Gesture-based Typology of Sliding-tones in Guqin Music. *Journal of New Music Research*, 36(2), 61–82.