The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timing; and 3) listeners’ evaluations. These methods include a polling application, implemented on participants’ smartphones, to provide fast-turnaround feedback from orchestral musicians about their experiences of playing under different conditions; and the use of digital methods to analyse acoustical data from the individual instruments of an orchestral string section, to facilitate a quantitative analysis of orchestral togetherness. Analyses of the experiential, quantitative and listener data from a preliminary study with an orchestra of musicians from the Royal Academy of Music, London, are presented, together with a discussion of the insights that these methods provide. The article concludes by considering the prospects of these methods for investigating nineteenth-century rehearsal and performance practices.

中文翻译：

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研究十九世纪管弦乐队的数字方法

十九世纪欧洲音乐文化发生了许多重大变化，包括管弦乐队的规模和性质的变化以及现代指挥家的崛起。管弦乐队的协调和音乐领导在历史上采取了多种形式，但从大约 19 世纪中叶开始，无声指挥逐渐开始取代歌剧和音乐会管弦乐队中其他形式的计时和器乐领导。很少或没有实证工作试图调查这种发展的音乐、社会和感知后果，主要是由于必须解决的技术挑战。本文描述了创新数字方法的开发和实施，以提供大型合奏的详细和多方面的图片，调查个人音乐机构的不同分布对以下方面的影响：1）音乐家的演奏经验；2) 整体协调和表现时间；3）听众的评价。这些方法包括在参与者的智能手机上实施的投票应用程序，以提供管弦乐音乐家关于他们在不同条件下演奏的体验的快速反馈；以及使用数字方法分析来自管弦乐部分的各个乐器的声学数据，以促进对管弦乐整体性的定量分析。对来自伦敦皇家音乐学院的音乐家管弦乐队的初步研究中的经验、定量和听众数据进行了分析，并讨论了这些方法提供的见解。