In general, think of this: You are touching a musical instrument. You are physically touching the strings, and you can undoubtedly imagine many different ways of touching the strings that would have different effects on the sound produced. If you were to sit down and imagine different ways to play violin, you would probably come up with techniques that already have standardized names (in Italian, of course) and perhaps even standardized symbols in notation. The possibilities are AMAZING and definitely not limited to simple pitch/loudness (I mean, obviously!)
If you want to see a reference, go to your local library and find a book like The Study of Orchestration (https://www.amazon.com/Study-Orchestration-Fourth-Samuel-Adl...) and flip to the section on strings. I own this book, but I don’t know where it is at the moment, so… off the top of my head, here are other dimensions besides pitch and loudness:
- Notes can be connected in different ways. Legato, détaché, martelé, staccato, spiccato, sautillé, jeté/ricochet, tremolo, pizzacato, louré, marcato
- “Extended techniques”—altering the tuning, col legno, etc.
These all affect the sound. Note that the difference between staccato and legato is NOT accounted for solely by the length of the notes as in a MIDI file. You also might be surprised how many of these have really boring, everyday notational conventions. As in, a violinist would look at sheet music and say, “obviously, technique X is used for this note”, but that would not be encoded in the MIDI file at all.
All of the above techniques are explained and demonstrated in YouTube videos if you are interested.
If you want to see a reference, go to your local library and find a book like The Study of Orchestration (https://www.amazon.com/Study-Orchestration-Fourth-Samuel-Adl...) and flip to the section on strings. I own this book, but I don’t know where it is at the moment, so… off the top of my head, here are other dimensions besides pitch and loudness:
- Notes can be connected in different ways. Legato, détaché, martelé, staccato, spiccato, sautillé, jeté/ricochet, tremolo, pizzacato, louré, marcato
- Bowing direction: up/down (they sound different)
- Adjust bow position: sul ponticello, sul tasto
- Natural and artificial harmonics
- Use of mutes
- “Extended techniques”—altering the tuning, col legno, etc.
These all affect the sound. Note that the difference between staccato and legato is NOT accounted for solely by the length of the notes as in a MIDI file. You also might be surprised how many of these have really boring, everyday notational conventions. As in, a violinist would look at sheet music and say, “obviously, technique X is used for this note”, but that would not be encoded in the MIDI file at all.
All of the above techniques are explained and demonstrated in YouTube videos if you are interested.