(geen Nederlandse tekst beschikbaar)
While continuously making an effort to improve performance quality, performing musicians don’t cease to challenge their own physical and artistic possibilities. Two different approaches are widely spread: the “artistic approach”, often accused to lack uniformity and objectivity, and to be trial and error based, is an individual oriented method focusing on the whole playing apparatus with conclusions formulated in a personal terminology. The “scientific approach”, often accused to have little applicability in a practical context, focuses on small segments of the playing apparatus studied under controlled laboratory conditions.
During preliminary research, we tried in cooperation between scientists and artists to develop an observation method unifying these two essentially complementary approaches. Although looking very promising, due to technical limitations these observations rendered no really usable results so far. By focusing on different aspects of the playing apparatus in a four-stage research process, this project aims to fill the gap and to develop a new approach, which should be capable of making recent discoveries from positive sciences usable for artistic performance, not only on saxophone, but by extension other wind instruments too.