Classification of Common Violin Bowing Techniques Using Gesture Data from a Playable Measurement System

This paper presents the results of a recent study of common violin bowing techniques using a newly designed measurement system. This measurement system comprises force, inertial, and position sensors installed on a carbon fiber violin bow and electric violin, and enables recording of real player bowing gesture under normal playing conditions. Using this system, performances of six different common bowing techniques (accented détaché, détaché lancé, louré, martelé, staccato, and spiccato) by each of eight violinists were recorded. Using a subset of the gesture data collected, the task of classifying these data by bowing technique was undertaken. Toward this goal, singular value decompostion (SVD) was used to compute the principal components of the data set, and then a k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN) classifier was employed, using the principal components as inputs. The results of this analysis are presented below.