Acoustics radiation and modal analysis of a piano forte and its fac-simile

Francois Ollivier (1) , Sylvie Le Moyne , Sandie Leconte

1 DALEMBERT - Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

The Music Museum in Paris keeps in its collection a piano forte made in 1802 by the well known piano maker Erard. Historical literature shows that the spreading out of the Erard’s instrument was very wide. Indeed this model was acquired by Haydn or Beethoven and by many other pianists and composers in France. As it is a unique witness of this type of process, it was decided to keep the instrument of the museum collection in its original state, and to build a facsimile. In the objectives of increasing our knowledge of this instrument and to compare the original and its facsimile, an experimental modal analysis of the soundboard was performed.The Impact Planar Nearfield Acoustic Holography, was used. This technique implements NAH on the basis of the acoustic impulse response field and is well adapted to modal analysis. The behaviours of the two specimens are compared. Besides a particularity of this piano is that it has a second soundboard, called fake board, added over the strings. A second objective of the measurement is then to understand the acoustical role of this fake board by comparing the sound field with and without it.

Domaines: Acoustique [physics.class-ph]

Francois Ollivier, Sylvie Le Moyne, Sandie Leconte. Acoustics radiation and modal analysis of a piano forte and its fac-simile. Acoustics 2012, Apr 2012, Nantes, France. ⟨hal-00811332⟩