I’ve read what Dale says about “chiff”, but I’m still in dark as to what the sound is, do conical whistle bores have it while tubular bores don’t.
I understand that the conical bore is an attempt to “even out” the strength and breathiness of the two octaves, which I assume is what gives the whistle “chiff”.
Can you hear the sound in a comparison of two whistles?
I know it would be almost impossible to describe, but I’d like to know where I could hear it.
Chiff is the attack sound when you START a note. It isn’t the airiness of a note, or the purity or lack of purity, or overtones. It is best heard on an organ which has a stop for chiff.
However, the phrase has been co-opted by people on this board, and as such, it means exactly what they want it to mean. No more and no less.
Thank you both, and for the directions to the excellent thread, TomB.
Now it makes sense.
Holt
[ This Message was edited by: Holt on 2003-01-29 13:24 ]
I’m in the minority who thinks
chiff includes the breathy sound
of a whistle period, on the attack,
of course, but afterwards, too.
In effect, the part of the sound
of a whistle that’s noise, breathy.
Now ask us about fipples!
chiff, n. Any of a variety of articles that might be stored in a chifforobe or chiffonier.
On 2003-01-29 14:04, jim stone wrote:
Now ask us about fipples!
A fipple is the block under the windway of a handmade whistle, tabor pipe, or recorder. There is no distinct fipple on many mass produced plastic headed whistles which have a single solid mouthpiece.
On 2003-01-29 13:21, tyghress wrote:
Chiff is the attack sound when you START a note. It isn’t the airiness of a note, or the purity or lack of purity, or overtones. It is best heard on an organ which has a stop for chiff.However, the phrase has been co-opted by people on this board, and as such, it means exactly what they want it to mean. No more and no less.
\
Just a tad partisan if I may say so tyghress. Now let me do a quick summary for those who haven’t yet been party to this unfinished debate. To slightly oversimplify, there are two schools of thought here.
Tyghress represents the old ‘use chiff to mean what it meant to pipe makers’ school of thought. Chiff, on this view, is the attack sound when you start a note.
The other view—Jim Stone represents this one—is that ‘chiff’ is as good a word as any for the furry, raspy overtones that hang around right through the note.
Since both phenomena exist and are worth keeping separate, what should we do about terminology?
Those in the feline fold use different arguments. Why alter the meaning of a term that was already clear and can be applied to whistles in it’s original meaning? Only C&F-ers use the term in the corrupted sense—since it muddies the waters, let’s set matters straight here.
Those who adopt the stoned point of view argue that linguistic change is a fact of life and that, since the vast majority of whistlers use the term in the altered sense, it is futile (and reactionary) to swim against the tide.
In my opinion neither side has won the argument although I tend very slightly towards the stoned view.
Sometimes linguistic change is a bad thing; it’s bad when we lose the vocabulary to make subtle distinctions we once could make. Example. The words ‘inspired’ and ‘inspiring’ do not quite mean the same thing. In my neck of the woods, both have given way to ‘inspirational’ and with this the language has lost expressive power. This is a bad thing. No harm is done, though, if new words are introduced to allow us to continue to make all the old distinctions. But they haven’t been.
Even when changes are due (initially) to a misunderstanding, it is futile to object when they take hold. As soon as a significant number of native speakers start making a mistake, it ceases to be a mistake. I contend that ‘chiff’ has come to mean what the revisionaries take it to mean quite independently of anything taking place on this board. My evidence: designers of synth patches clearly and obviously use that term to mean the furry and fuzzy overtones that persist through the note. That is what I took the term to mean long before I discovered this board. The change has already taken place in the general community. (But we still need two terms here, whatever we decide.)
OK folks, carry on arguing.
[ This Message was edited by: Wombat on 2003-01-30 00:24 ]
I don’t think I’ve ever played a whistle which had a significant amount of initial-attack-chiff, at least nothing remotely similar to that produced by some organ pipes. There is a chiffy-type noise which I frequently produce when trying to do a legato transition from the first to the second octave, but that may be due to faulty technique. Anyhow, my opinion is that since organ pipe chiff is relatively rare on the tin whistle, the term may as well be redefined to refer to non-musical noise (such as breathiness) on a sustained note, which is by no means a rare phenomenon.
Well, call me “old school” or reactionary, but I’m a firm believer in the attack sound definition. As a scientist, I think there are two seperate phenomenon that we are describing here, (the attack sound and the sustained tonal impurity) and hence we should use two different words. This is just so that we can describe them seperately, and be able to talk with precision.
As for whistles with attack chiff, I have a Chieftan high D, and it sure has attack chiff when you tongue a note, though I think we’d all agree that this is minimized by the fact that we don’t tend to tongue many notes. In the previous threads, Vaporlock showed us the spectra of several whistles which clearly showed attack chiff. To me, this is clear evidence that it does exist, and it is different from sustained tonal impurity, so we have to figure out what to call it. I would propose “chiff”.
though I think we’d all agree that this is minimized by the fact that we don’t tend to tongue many notes.
We don’t??
(Oh no, I didn’t mean to add that debacle to the current discussion)
Hi. My intention was to give what
I thought to be the ‘old’ school
meaning of the word ‘chiff,’
not to revise it! The definition
I had of ‘chiff’ is ‘the breathy
sound of organ pipes.’ Well, the
breathy sound of organ pipes
is certainly apparent on the
attack, but it’s there afterwards,
too. So I thought that chiff is
the breathy sound wherever it
occurs in the sounding of
a pipe–and a whistle is an
organ pipe, really, plus holes.
If I’m mistaken about what
the word ‘chiff’ originally means,
than I gladly defer to the original
meaning of the word. And well may
I be mistaken! But so far I
haven’t yet a reason to think
I am (except a long record of
being mistaken about virtually
everything).
Suppose however I am mistaken.
When people ask whether a whistle
is chiffy, they usually want
to know if it has a general breathy sound.
Now certainly the breathy sound of
a breathy whistle is audible
throughout the sounding of
the note. So if ‘chiff’ is
the wrong word, having only to
do with the attack-breathiness,
I propose ‘chuff’ to mean what
I now maintain ‘chiff’ always
meant.
I consulted the OED, which has
no listing for ‘chiff.’ The closest
it comes is ‘chiffchaff,’ a kind
of warbler. Science marches on! Best
Hey Jim, I was calling your opponents reactionary. None of that crowd has yet addressed my point that synth makers, who surely don’t look for definiitons of chiff on this site, use the word chiff as you and I have been.
To me, all this talk about the difference between the attack sound and other non-musical sounds and which are and aren’t chiff seems out of character with the fact that this is a folk instrument. Precise scientific distinctions don’t fit the setting.
I am inclined to define chiff as any non-musical sound that a whistle makes, particularly sounds that give it its characteristic, rough-hewn, folksy quality.
To go beyond that and try to nail it down to exactly which non-musical sounds are chiff and which are something other than chiff might be appropriate for pipe organs or other concert instruments, but to me it just seems too fussy for a tin pennywhistle, and not in the spirit of the instrument.
Best wishes,
Jerry
P.S. We can still talk about “attack chiff,” “breathiness,” etc. Using chiff as a more general term doesn’t handicap us if we want to discuss certain parts of a whistle’s sound.
As a purely practical matter, the more general definition for chiff will win by default because there are enough people using it that way, and there are enough people not sophisticated enough to make the fine distinctions between different kinds of non-musical whistle sounds, that anyone who wants to specifically reference attack chiff will have to say that’s what they mean by chiff every time if that’s what they want people to understand them to mean. There’s no way around that. You can’t round everyone up and fine them everytime you catch them using the word chiff to mean something other than the attack sound, in hopes of retraining half the whistling world.
Yes, I understand. Makes sense to me.
Perhaps there is no fact of the
matter as to what ‘chiff’ originally
meant. If the meaning I claim was
original was in use among
many, maybe there’s
some point to making it our own.
As early participants on this
this thread talk about ‘attack-chiff’
it seems ‘chiff’ enables us to
make helpful distinctions and
talk clearly. Two
words, ‘chiff’ and ‘chuff’, say,
to denote attack-breathiness
and post-attack breathiness,
might become confusing.
Forgive, if you can,
this brazen semantic imperialism!
If anybody has something that
settles the historical question,
I hope you’ll post it.
To chaff at chiff?
To sniff at chuff?
The chiffchaff warbles,
‘That’s enough!’
By the by, Jerry,
did you get my second private
message? I did want to know more
about some of the things you
were saying, if you have the opportunity.
Best, Jim
Hi, Jim.
Indeed I did. Sorry for the delay. I’ve been working on it, but it will probably be several more days still, before I’ve finished composing a response.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Jim, it’s highly possible I’m wrong too, and I’ll admit a certain organ-pipe bias here, because I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the physics of the whistle using the organ pipe as a close analogy. Maybe defining a new term is not such a bad idea, and to satisfy both camps, calling it attack chiff and sustained chiff might be a compromise.
As for the use of the term by the synth patch people, I really had no idea, not owning a synth.
Jerry, I didn’t realize the whistle had a “spirit” - I thought it was just a tube with holes in it. Again I’m showing my bias, but I think applying science to figure out how something works is a good thing. Otherwise, it’s just magic. But you are right in the end, no matter how we define it here, usage will prevail.
While were on the subject, the reason I think the two things are different is this: when you blow in a whistle, the air coming out of the windway forms little eddies. These eddies hit the blade, and cause pressure swings in the air above and below the blade. The frequency of these vibrations are not initially the same as the frequency of the note you are attempting to play, but much higher. This “edgetone” vibration start the air in the pipe vibrating, but this does not start instantaneously, so for a very brief moment, you hear the edgetone. I think this is attack chiff.
The breathy stuff is due to wind noise around blade and the windway exit, and is there as long as air is going through them. sustained chiff.
Now that I’ve managed to raise everyones ire, anyone got opinions?
chiff= a smidgeon of hard cheese that includes the outer skin of rennet.
I thought “chiff” was a scorbutic ailment characterized by a dermal maculopapular eczema accompanied by hyperthermia and pharyngeal inflammation.
Mike