Scientific Article

Vocabulary to speak about touch: analysis of the discourse of electric guitar players

¹ Univ. Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, Junia/ISEN, Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, IEMN UMR 8520, 41 Boulevard Vauban, 59046 Lille Cedex, France
² Laboratoire Ligérien de Linguistique (LLL) UMR 7270, Site d’Orléans, 10 rue de Tours, BP 46527, 45065 Orléans Cedex 2, France
³ Institut de Recherche en Musicologie (IReMus) UMR 8223, UFR Musique et musicologie de la faculté des Lettres de Sorbonne Université-CNRS, 2 rue de Louvois, 75002 Paris, France

^* Corresponding author: paul.cambourian@junia.com

Received: 29 July 2021
Accepted: 29 November 2021

Abstract

This work presents a multidisciplinary approach to vibrotactile perception, applying linguistic methods to musical acoustics. We are interested more particularly in the sense of touch as a part of the multisensory experience of playing a musical instrument. Six words and their inflections are chosen from the literature in musical acoustics dealing with vibrotactile perception: “comfort”, “dynamics”, “response”, “feeling”, “touch” and “vibration”. Their use by musicians in playing situation is analyzed. The data used in this article comes from transcripts of two previous studies, conducted in French with professional guitarists natively speaking French. The linguistic analysis of the corpus is based on different features which help to categorize the utterances according to each observed parameter, namely the relationship with the sense of touch, the object that is qualified by the words under study and the implication in discourse of the interviewee. The results permit to understand the use of the six categories of words in relationship with the sense of touch, and provide perspectives to use some of these words to focus the discourse on the sense of touch in future studies.