Rolf Bader – författare

How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethnology. They emerge into living musical systems like all life is self-organization. Therefore the Physical Culture Theory knows no split between nature and nurture, hard and soft sciences, brains and musical instruments. It formulates mathematically complex systems as Physical Models ratherthan Artificial Intelligence.  It includes ethical rules for maintaining life and finds culture and arts to be Human Rights. Enlarging these ideas and mathematical methods into all fields of culture, ecology, economy, or the like will be the task for the next decades to come.

Musical Performance covers many aspects like Musical Acoustics, Music Psychology, or motor and prosodic actions. It deals with basic concepts of the origin or music and its evolution, ranges over neurocognitive foundations, and covers computational, technological, or simulation solutions. This volume gives an overview about current research in the foundation of musical performance studies on all these levels. Recent concepts of synchronized systems, evolutionary concepts, basic understanding of performance as Gestalt patterns, theories of chill as performance goals or historical aspects are covered. The neurocognitive basis of motor action in terms of music, musical syntax, as well as therapeutic aspects are discussed. State-of-the-art applications in performance realizations, like virtual room acoustics, virtual musicians, new concepts of real-time physical modeling using complex performance data as input or sensor and gesture studies with soft- and hardware solutions are presented. So although the field is still much larger, this volume presents current trends in terms of understanding, implementing, and perceiving performance.

Computational Mechanics of the Classical Guitar describes a new dynamic paradigm in instrument acoustics based on time-dependent transient analysis and simulation of complete musical instruments. It describes the current state of theoretical and experimental research into the guitar for engineers, instrument makers and musicians. This includes a summary of the basic equations for the mechanics of vibrating bodies and a presentation of the FDM (finite difference method) model with which the true vibrational behaviour of the instrument as an entire system can be understood for the first time. This monograph presents various new theoretical and experimental results and insights into guitar playing such as the coupling between the strings and the top plate or a description of the finger noise made when the fingers slide over the strings before plucking.

Nonlinearities are a crucial and founding principle in nearly all musical systems, may they be musical instruments, timbre or rhythm perception and production, or neural networks of music perception. This volume gives an overview about present and past research in these fields. In Musical Acoustics, on the one hand the nonlinearities in musical instruments often produce the musically interesting features. On the other, musical instruments are nonlinear by nature, and tone production is the result of synchronization and self-organization within the instruments. Furthermore, as nearly all musical instruments are driven by impulses an Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) is suggested, an iterative framework holding for all musical instruments. It appears that this framework is able to reproduce the complex and perceptionally most salient initial transients of musical instruments. In Music Psychology, nonlinearities are present in all areas of musical features, like pitch, timbre, or rhythm perception. In terms of rhythm production and motion, self-organizing models are the only ones able to explain sudden phase-transitions while tapping. Self-organizing neural nets, both of the Kohonen and the connectionist types are able to reproduce tonality, timbre similarities, or phrases. The volume also gives an overview about the signal processing tools suitable to analyze sounds in a nonlinear way, both in the Fourier-domain, like Wavelets or correlograms, and in the phase-space domain, like fractal dimensions or information structures. Furthermore, it gives an introduction to Physical Modeling of musical instruments using Finite-Element and Finite-Difference methods, to cope with the high complexity of instrument bodies and wave couplings. It appears, that most musical systems are self-organized ones, and only therefore able to produce all unexpected and interesting features of music, both in production and perception.