SOUNDBLOG

claytoncubitt:

“SINCE Pythagoras, musicians and scientists have known (or thought they knew) that the lowest pitch a string stretched taut can produce — the fundamental — is the pitch it produces when vibrating freely. “Stop” the string anywhere between the end points, and the vibrating section sounds at a higher pitch. Theoretically, there is no ceiling. As with dancing, the sky’s the limit, but the floor is always the floor.

For the last five centuries, give or take, the range of a violin bottomed out on the G below middle C, the pitch of the open G string. But fiddlers are not like dancers after all. For nearly two decades, the Japanese violinist Mari Kimura, 48, has been exploring unsuspected subterranean sounds as much as an octave deeper.

Complementing the familiar concept of harmonics (pitches drawn from the overtones of a given fundamental), Ms. Kimura has named her freshly discovered sonorities “subharmonics.” So far she has mastered the subharmonic octave, third, second and fifth. She is now pursuing the elusive subharmonic fourth, undeterred by a suspicion that it may be an impossibility.”