But what if the “new super-duper-hyper gizmo” is just the same old mincer under a new super-duper shell, and the chef still claims he had noticed an enormous difference?
For all I know the chef might even experience an enourmus difference in his cooking if he wears an funny hat, but that doesn’t mean that the shape or size of the chefs hat will affect the taste and apperence of the finished meal.
That is not even pseudo science
Don’t underestimate the placebo effect of any experiment involving people. If you think you play an expensive and exceptional whistle by a top maker you may not just belive that you play a lot better, than if you knew it was just Generation with a new paintjob, your playing might even improve in reality. But that has nothing to do with the whistle, it is not a physical effect, it is the power of your mind, a psychological effect.
I think you keep on missing a small point. The test is blind. The piper doesn’t know what he’s playing.
Anyway, I tried the funny hat , and it made an enormous difference to my playing. Before, I knew I’m not all that hot. Now I know that I look it, too.
The placebo effect exists for every blind test, it is all about believing. By that I mean that if you repeat your chanter blind test, but this time the two chanters are the same, players just think they are playing two different types. The out come might be the same.
Now to cut things short:
If the same reed is used, the position of the reed is identical in both chanters, and the geometrical and physical properties of the bores of the maple and blackwood chanters are the same. I disagree with your quote
I believe that you will end up with a 50-50% result wich is nothing else than a qualified guess.
I predict that two or more whistles made with different woods and made by the same person in the same style and the same care will evince different tone if compared on the same day, time and place played by the same player.
By the multi-semantic word “tone” I don’t mean pitch of a note but the colour or timbre (timber) of it.
You see different woods breathe and respond to the environment, the humidity, the players moisture, the dryness and all the other things differently. Wood does not exist in a twilight vacuum but takes on accretions (even if temporarily) in the material and musical contexts it finds itself. So does aluminium and brass and plastic but their parity fails in the comparisons of the different woods.
I like it that Jesus was a carpenter, Krishna a bamboo flute player and Gautama gained enlightenment under a tree.
Humans like apes and monkeys have some inborn affinity with wood and things of tree. It would be difficult to swing from cement.
I can semi-vouch for that. In any given batch that I make (usually from 6 to 10 whistles), each of them has a different sound or “feel”. Some of this MAY be due to differences in the wood, but OTOH, I’ll sometimes have two wooden whistles in a batch, cut from the same piece of wood, and even they will sound different. Even two polymer ones vary quite a lot, suggesting to me at least that the voicing is much more of a factor than the choice of material
. I might just sign up .