The Vibrato on the Violin Part 2

Before we start exploring the vibrato and it’s technical aspects we have to look at some terms that are used to describe certain vibrato techniques.
Dealing with waves we stumble upon three main physical terms:
Frequency, wave length and amplitude.

The frequency of a tone is directly related to the tone pitch. The higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. The term frequency means the number of oscillations within a certain timeframe, usually a second. If you have a frequency of 440Hz it means there are 440 oscillations within one second.

The wave length is not interesting for us. It’s related to the frequency. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wave length. Just for the sake of completeness…

The amplitude describes the size of the oscillations in our wave. In other words: How big the waves are.
For a tone you could explain the amplitude as the sound pressure. The larger the amplitude the louder the tone.

When we look at the vibrato those terms become a different meaning because we describe a movement, not a steady tone.
The frequency of our vibrato means the number of oscillations of our vibrato movement. The faster we vibrate the higher is our vibrato frequency. The vibrato amplitude is the “size” of our vibrato. If we increase our movements we also increase the vibrato amplitude.

The result is:
If we change our vibrato frequency the tone doesn’t change as well. Our mean tone remains on the same tone frequency.
When we change the vibrato amplitude we don’t change the sound pressure as well. We get a bigger change in tone frequency instead since we increase our vibrato movements.

You see, frequency and amplitude have totally different effects or meanings depending on what we try to describe.
In this series I will mainly refer to the description of movements, not tones and their physical explanation.

I won’t finish this physical crash course for musicians without an outlook what’s coming next.
A vibrato is a controlled movement that results in a consistent oscillation of the tone. Those oscillations are performed with the finger that plays the tone. But the finger must not leave the position. It remains in the same position!

How do we manage that?
Well, that’s the topic of the following post. So stay tuned!

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