Felix Rohner's scientific contributions

Publications (5)

Article
The HANG is a new steel instrument consisting of two spherical shells of steel, suitable for playing with the hands. Seven to nine notes are harmonically tuned around a central deep note which is formed by the Helmholtz resonance. Elliptical note areas are formed on the upper shell and tuned so that the (1,1)a and (1,1)b modes of each note area hav...
Article
The ping, which has the same playing range as a tenor steelpan, is a new instrument in the steelpan family. Its playing surface is sandwich hardened steel having a uniform thickness of 0.9 mm, and its skirt is of stainless steel 1.25‐mm thick. Each note area has a small elliptical dome at the center to provide stability and a durable strike point....
Article
Modal analysis contributes significantly to an understanding of the vibrational patterns and the rich spectral tone color of the Caribbean steelpan sound. This will be illustrated with several examples of computer animations of steelpan normal modes. In addition to showing some of the low?order modes which contribute strongly to the radiated sound,...
Article
The HANG is a new musical instrument, suitable for playing with the hands, consisting of two hemispherical shells of nitrided steel. It is the product of a collaboration among scientists, engineers and hangmakers, thanks to which we have been able to better understand the tuning process in all its complexity. Seven notes are harmonically tuned arou...
Article
Full-text available
The HANG is a new hand-played steel instrument developed by PANArt in Switzerland. We describe the modes of vibration, observed by holographic interferometry and the sound radiation from the instrument, observed by measuring the sound intensity in an anechoic room. A low-voice HANG is compared with a high voice-HANG.

Citations

... The high-voice HANG we report in this paper had 9 notes tuned to a pentatonic scale, as shown in Fig. 2. This is the same HANG describe in an earlier paper [11]. Other scales are illustrated in Fig. 4. The low-voice HANG had 9 notes tuned to an Ake Bono scale with the lowest note at F3. ...
... A third and final potential motivation that arises from existing literature is that of wanting to produce new sounds or timbres with which to make music. This wish to work with new timbres drove the development of some modern acoustic instruments (e.g. the hang, invented in 2000, Rohner & Schärer, 2007). It was furthermore the principal motivation of many of the early pioneers of noise and electronic music, such as Luigi Russolo and Edgar Varèse. ...