For violin experts
Violinists and violin teachers
The recordings in Healthy Strings are made by violinists themselves – at home, at a conservatory or in a lab, with two cameras and a short, standardised protocol. Violin teachers bring the pedagogical view: what does a set-up or a bowing pattern mean for this player and this task?
Record yourself
Video: how to record standardised violin videosThe two-camera set-up with 30° and 90° views, microphone position, framing, synchronisation by clap and the procedure of the recording protocol.Watch on YouTube ↗- Two cameras or smartphones on tripods: about 30° to the front right and 90° from the right side, whole body, violin and whole bow in view.
- One clear clap at the start, visible and audible in both cameras.
- Part 1 with metronome (quarter note = 60): open strings, détaché and legato, string crossings, arpeggios, a whole-bow scale, vibrato, tremolo. Part 2: three short excerpts in your own timing.
The protocol is a draft. If something is unclear, too difficult or missing, tell us: Healthy-Strings@matthias-bertsch.at. Please do not send videos by e-mail – we will arrange a secure upload.
The teacher’s view
In the video assessment, violin teachers first estimate the playing level from novice to professional, then look at the instrument set-up, the bow arm, the left hand, the execution of the task and the tone – each judged as functional or limiting for this particular player, not against a single ideal. They also say how well a clip can be assessed at all. We are preparing pretests with violin teachers; if you would like to take part, please get in touch. Invited raters log in to the rating area.
Partners in this field
- Conservatorio di Musica Luigi Boccherini, Lucca – violin performance and pedagogy, recruitment of musicians
- mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna – violin pedagogy and music physiology
- Casa Paganini – InfoMus, University of Genoa – multimodal recordings and technology-enhanced learning of violin playing (TELMI)
Selected literature
- Blanco, A. D., Tassani, S., & Ramirez, R. (2021). Real-time sound and motion feedback for violin bow technique learning: A controlled, randomized trial. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 648479. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648479
- Dalmazzo, D., & Ramírez, R. (2019). Bowing gestures classification in violin performance: A machine learning approach. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, Article 344. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00344
- D’Amato, V., Volta, E., Oneto, L., Volpe, G., Camurri, A., & Anguita, D. (2020). Understanding violin players’ skill level based on motion capture: A data-driven perspective. Cognitive Computation, 12, 1356–1369. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12559-020-09768-8
- Schoonderwaldt, E. (2009). The player and the bowed string: Coordination of bowing parameters in violin and viola performance. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 126(5), 2709–2720. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.3203209
- Schoonderwaldt, E., & Altenmüller, E. (2014). Coordination in fast repetitive violin-bowing patterns. PLoS ONE, 9(9), e106615. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0106615
- Volpe, G., Kolykhalova, K., Volta, E., Ghisio, S., Waddell, G., Alborno, P., Piana, S., Canepa, C., & Ramírez-Meléndez, R. (2017). A multimodal corpus for technology-enhanced learning of violin playing. In Proceedings of the 12th Biannual Conference of the Italian SIGCHI Chapter (CHItaly ’17), Article 25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125571.3125588