Acquisition and Study of Blowing Pressure Profiles in Recorder Playing

This paper presents a study of blowing pressure profilesacquired from recorder playing. Blowing pressure signalsare captured from real performance by means of a a lowintrusiveness acquisition system constructed around commercial pressure sensors based on piezoelectric transducers.An alto recorder was mechanically modified by a luthierto allow the measurement and connection of sensors whilerespecting playability and intrusiveness. A multi-modaldatabase including aligned blowing pressure and sound signals is constructed from real practice, covering the performance space by considering different fundamental frequencies, dynamics, articulations and note durations. Once signals were pre-processed and segmented, a set of temporalenvelope features were defined as a basis for studying andconstructing a simplified model of blowing pressure profilesin different performance contexts.