I’m not a flute player - though tempted (a story for another time) and am designing/making whistles. There are some similarities. I am interested mostly in making wooden flutes (and not metal) but have been mostly experimenting with plastic tubing (quick and easy for experiments). I have made a few wooden whistles and while they are not as good overall as the best plastic whistles I’ve made they have a certain quality to the sound and feel when playing that I know when figure out the details they are going to be better (at least for me).
My whistles are mostly 2 or 3 pieces and it is the head joint that seems to make the most difference. If I attach a wood head joint to a plastic body it sounds the same as with a wood body, if I attach a plastic head to a wood body it sounds pretty much the same as with a plastic body.
I believe is the case for flutes as well. By this I mean that given a reasonable body a new head joint can make a significant difference, correct?
Sorry, I guess I should’ve clarified what I was asking. I was thinking about taking an experimentally acceptable flute, ie: hand-made, and creating an exact replica in all respects, down to the last micrometer. Since, as has been oft-mentioned, that no two flutes from the same maker are identical, it seems only logical to ask how someone might go about getting an “exact” copy of a flute in a different material. Are computerized manufacturing tools available today that could accomplish this?
I have visited one high-end flute maker who has the capability of duplicating the embouchure cut of any headjoint. I don’t know why this couldn’t be done with the whole instrument eventually, if the tools were produced. Just curious is all…
if it was an exact duplicate, down to the spin of the electron would be exactly the same and wonderful, i’d presume. the problem is getting the measurements, and the machinery. i also wonder if the maker you are talking about is getting exact, or nearly exact. in the world of science, even precise measurements are based on presumptions and averages.
if you really like the idea, go work on it! it is definitely something that needs to be done.
Many new flute designers are intimidated by the Acoustic Mathematics needed to make a flute and tone hole set accurate. I can say from experience that it is easier than you think. Basic Geometry and Algebra using a standard scientific calculator is all that is neccessary.
Conical bores and joints are used in woodwinds to manipulate the Nodes (places of least vibration) and Anti-Nodes/Waves (places of greatest vibration). By changing the angle or taper of the bore a designer can “tune” these Nodes and Waves for matching harmonics. Why? As each overblown register is acquired, the flute extends the air column a little at the toneholes,voicing and bore end due to increased input velocity. This “Phase-Shift-Flattening-Effect” is common to most woodwinds.
Recorders use a combination of tapered conical bore and a “speaker/thumb-hole” to tune the registers and the common “concert flute” uses a tapered headjoint and a tunable “plug” to balance the Nodes and Waves for inter-register tuning. A conoidal bore has a drawback though, reduced range. Any Tin Whistler will tell you that their Generation cylindrical bore will play more than 4 registers with very little embouchure correction, but Recorder players are restricted to a strained 2 1/2 registers.
Materials do contribute to hamonic acoustics, but in a minor way. Sound travels faster in harder materials and this favors high harmonics. The opposite is true of softer materials, like wood, that dampens high frequencies to favor low harmonics. It is the Harmonic “Tone-Color” that is effected by types of materials. (The speed of sound in materials are calculated using the “Young’s Modulus” fomula.)
Changeable Joints: Thes are not “new” to woodwinds. Renaissance and Baroque instruments have been made with sets of joints for changing keys. This is done in many ways, including tapered joints, reduced/enlarged “stepped” joints and tapered foot joints. These techniques are generalized as “Bore Perturbation”.
Once you get past the “stigma” of Acoustic Mathematics, you will achieve epiphany after epiphany! Simple calculator math for designing woodwinds can be found at…
Just wondering about FFT [I am a very young (24) Mechanical Engineer on my first job strangly building dams in Mocambique. so I have not had much access to elecronic test equiptment and other fun engineering toys] but can’t a good pressure transducer or mic. with apropriate software for adjusting the sampling rate be used to capture the entire song played.
The data could be graphed with a simple ploting utility (I think MatLab is a good choice?) and inspected manually to isolate individual notes for FFT analysis. Then you could run the FFT on just that part of the data to get your frequency content. Then we could avoid a lot of confusion about dark or bright (they will always be useful for the musician) The war for the material would probably rage on however, but atleast we would have ways of talking about it in terms of percent fequency content.
I only really did this once to analyse compressed air line pressures in a machine shop while various air tools were running, 60 hz in the US is the dark horse you never are quite sure if it is really there or if it is the electrical supply, the flicker of the florescent lights was a pain as well. I guess you could just run the test with no sound going on to see what the ambient looks like.
And of course a flute doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
It is played and the player emits warmth
and moisture and different materials will respond differently to these, won’t they?
Some will hold moisture longer on their surface, some will warm up faster.
Is there any significant science on the accretional effects on different materials?
i’m sure there are, but probably not figured into instrument making. as you well know, in instrument making circles, nobody definitively has said anything about oiling yet, and it’s been a few hundred years. who knows what is in some dusty book somewhere that might help us!