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‘Dubro’ Resophonic Guitar: Glissando Gestures

2022; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-96964-6_20

2213-8692

Victor J. Law, Denis P. Dowling,

Music and Audio Processing

Whether in the Hawaiian, Bluegrass, Rock ‘n’ roll, film sound track or animated cartoon genre, the swoop (glissando) sound made on a slide-guitar is one the most instantly recognizable in western music. This paper reports on the complex acoustical and perceptual glissando of the opening few seconds of Warner Brothers ‘Looney Tunes’ ascending glissando, and its counterpart (descending glissando), both played on a ‘Dubro’ resophonic guitar. The aim is to analyze these guitar themes in an attempt to provide both a historical development, as well as a technical understanding of the generated sound. With the resophonic guitar tuned to open G (D-G-D-G-B-D), the radiated sounds, includes the guitarist gestures and the glissando sound of steel and glass bottleneck, Using the toolbox within Audacity software (time-domain, standard autocorrelation, spectrogram and noise reduction), the recorded tracks are transcribed for tempo, consonant, dissonant, string squeaks, and incoherent/coherent noise. This study also attempts to map the complex psychoacoustic tonal quality of a resophonic guitar, which has been demonstrated to impact emotionally on the listener. It is found that dynamic slide movement divides the string scale length into two coupled longitudinal vibrating segments, each producing a coherent continuous mirrored exponential varying pitch that extends to the guitar brilliance region (4.5–20 kHz). Incoherent or ‘hiss-like’ noise is found within the lower psychoacoustic warm region (0–0.5 kHz). This incoherent noise is linked to a slip-stick friction process between the slide and string. Slide material and slide direction varies the intensity of the noise that has a Voss-Clarke 1/f-like response with a Brownian ~ − 7 dB/10 Hz roll-off. It is proposed that the guitarists fretting arm musculoskeletal system plays a role in the generation incoherent or hiss-like noise.