Interactive / Research
Release as Articulation
On the organ, articulation is mostly about release: how long you hold each note before the next one speaks. Rudimar's doctoral research turns that into a single number you can watch in real time. Play a few notes below and see your own touch measured the way his method measures it.
Best with sound on. Play with your mouse or touch, your computer keys (A–K), or a MIDI keyboard if you have one. Scroll to Measure your touch to begin.
Experimental · work in progress
The idea
One number for touch
Take any note. Divide how long it actually sounds by the time until the next note begins. That ratio is the articulation. Near 1.0, notes touch or overlap - legato. Near 0.7, you can hear the gap - an ordinary, detached touch. Set the ratio for two notes, then play them.
Measure your touch
Play it two ways
This is the soprano line Rudimar analyzed - Brahms, Herzlich tut mich verlangen, Op. 122 No. 9. Play it once as smoothly as you can, then once with ordinary touch. Your notes land on the chart against his own measurements; watch the two clouds separate.
Hollow dots are Rudimar's recordings (legato above, ordinary below); record a pass to plot your filled dots against his.
Wider bar = held longer; the gap is the silence after it.
Soft flute to bright, strident reed.
Resonant rooms blur notes, so organists detach more to stay clear.
Notes play here in the browser, through the room you choose - a MIDI keyboard only sends notes. Use the on-screen keys, your computer keyboard (A–K), or a MIDI instrument.
The contribution
The Bonamigo measure of articulation
The ratio A is the raw measurement of a single note. The Bonamigo measure is the step that turns it into a judgment about touch: a number from -1 (fully detached, ordinary touch) through 0 (the boundary) to +1 (fully legato), telling you which side of a player's two styles a note falls on. The needle above is that number, live.
What makes it a research contribution is that the boundary is learned from data, not guessed. Across many repeated performances each note builds a distribution of articulation ratios, and the difference between two touches is tested for statistical significance (a Welch's t-test, with a Benjamini-Hochberg correction so that repeated testing does not manufacture false results). The more a musician plays, the sharper and more personal the measure becomes.
This work received a Best Student Paper Award at the International Symposium on Performance Science (ISPS 2025, Shanghai), and a full article is under review at Frontiers in Psychology.
Here it is simplified for play: it applies the study's published boundary to single notes, and treats whatever you play as one melodic line, rather than building your own statistical profile from many takes.
This demonstration is built on Rudimar's doctoral research, A Pedagogical Study of Release as Articulation (University of North Texas).