I just came across this article on the TallGrassWinds.com webpage which is reprinted from a march 1998 article of Scientific American. In essence it states that the material from which a wind instrument is made (be it a flute, whistle, horn, or reed) does not affect the tone of the instrument, but rather it’s the construction of the instrument (smoothness of the holes, mouthpiece, etc) which determines is what we generally attribute as ‘woody sound’ or ‘breathy’ or ‘bright’ etc. Most every site I’ve visited where wood is used, whether for flutes, whistles, or ulleann pipes, blackwood is always stated as the primary wood ‘due to its tone qualies, brightness’ and that other woods are offered and they are compared in terms of their stability and tone quality; whether they will be as bright, or a softer, woodier tone…
So how does the general populous out there feel about wood and winds? Does it or does in not affect tone quality and how would you respend to the article (link provided below).
On a side issue - do users in the flute forum cross over here and vice versa or does everyone pretty much keep to their own ‘turf’ Just curious since I usually have an urge to post similar questions on other boards as well, but fear redundancy.
This comes up from time to time. I don’t pretend to understand the physics, but I wouldn’t trust an auditorium full of science/engineering undergrads listening through a simple voice pa to a flute blown by a physics professor (I may be unjust here). I doubt they could even tell a Susato from an Sindt, or an oboe from a clarinet.
Science strikes again. In theory, a flute made of balsa wood or paper mache’ shold sound the same as a metal or ebony one. In practice, most players can tell the difference. This may be due to the finish of the bore as well as the undercut where the tone holes meet the bore. A softer wood will give a rougher bore surface than a harder wood. The different degrees of surface roughness will yield correspondingly different amounts of turbulance where the air column contacts the bore, and by inference, whether or not the tone holes are undercut, or degree of undercutting of the tone holes. Less turbulence = brighter and louder. A good player can easily hear the difference between say boxwood and blackwood. It is these subtle differences producing not so subtle differences in sound between different woods. Hence we see most flutes made of tropical tonewoods and damn few made of pine or spruce, not to mention the differences in durability. It is more a case of some scientists not taking science far enough.
Within limits, I’ll weigh in on the side that says that the material is less important than the voicing. Sure, Blackwood will sound different than Balsa, but those are extremes. Within the range of hardwoods commonly used for whistles, I’ve not really noticed a huge difference. Conversely, sometimes two whistles made from the same piece of wood will come out sounding noticeably different due to minute variations in the hand voicing process.
Well, people do sometimes think my Dixon whistle is wood. Had one lady who plays silver flute rather surprised to find it is plastic, after she heard me noodling around on it.
On the other hand, my mother plays bagpipes and insists that nothing but African Blackwood is acceptable for the drones. She’ll play a plastic chanter (the band plays on matching Warmac chanters), but she really doesn’t think much of the Dunbar plastic bagpipes. They lack the tonal qualities she is used to from blackwood. As she is a grade 1 piper, I think she knows what she is talking about. And she has played them, set them up, and given them a fair chance. Too bad. I was considering getting a set, but I think I’ll stick with something mom would be willing to listen to!
I for one will weigh in against the conventional physics. I will agree with Paul that the details of the design are largely responsible for the sound. But only largely, and I think that’s more true of a whistle than a flute, and more true for a whistle of the Schultz/Busman/Abell design (with a metal ring on the mouthpiece) than for a whistle that’s all wood.
I think the conventional physics is only an approximation – probably first order. It probably doesn’t fully account for the vibration in the wood/metal itself and also probably doesn’t fully account for the reflections from the inner surface. Why should that be any different in a flute than in a guitar? I suspect nobody would dispute that a spruce top sounds better than a walnut top.
I will agree that in most cases the differences in a maker’s wares from one instrument to another is probably greater than the differences between the woods. However, I do think there’s a pattern. As most people here have heard before, I think there’s something fundamentally different in the sound of boxwood flutes and whistles. Once I played boxwood, blackwood sounds just plain bland.
Oh, and there’s definitely some cross-fertilization between the Flute Forum and the PSWB. Several of us play both and post to/read both boards.
Physics schmysics, I say. Bloomfield expressed
my concern about some of the experiments.
Wood, and different types of wood, is making
a bigger difference than these theories
can plausibly account for.
I have not read the article but I tend to agree with Bloom. I was in the engineering field. My colleagues couldn’t agree on things well within our area of expertise. Opinions on any other area were strictly educated speculation.
There are too many other factors involved that affect tone quality. I am sure material does affect the tone. Smoothness of the bore is certainly a factor. The material will affect how smooth the bore can be made. Another factor that I think is probably important is the stiffness of the material. Stiffness will affect the way a material resonates. I believe there is an optimum stiffness for a pure tone at any given frequency. Hence a comprimise has to be made for a 2 octave range. Getting the right comprimise to produce the balance over that range is art not science.
My opinions
Ron
The physics argument is that the material
doesn’t resonate–that is vibrate.
So any difference in tone associated
with the material has to do with
smoothness of the bore or something
else consistent with the material
not resonating. That’s the part I find
hard to believe.
There’s the rub – Anyone who’s played a flute or low whistle knows that the material DOES vibrate.
A lot of physics is about approximation. The frictionless surface, massless string, etc. There’s a good joke about physicists and approximation:
One day a farmer’s cows all stopped giving milk. He went to the local farmers’ board and they sent a veterinarian. He examined all the cows and couldn’t find a thing wrong with them. Then the farmer brought in a dietician to see if something in their feed had gone bad. Dietician didn’t find anything. Then he brought in an environmental chemist to see if it was something in the water or ground. He took all sorts of samples, took them back to the lab, analyzed them, and he also turned up nothing. Finally, in desperation, he hired a physicist. The physicist came in, took all sorts of measurements, wrote furiously in his notebook, and finally said, “I’ve found it!”
The farmer asked what was the problem, and the physicist took out his notebook and drew a big circle on one page. He started out, “Now, say you’ve got a spherical cow. . .”
If the body of the Whistle or Flute does not vibrate then wall thickness would have no effect. I spent many years working on vibration reduction on submarines. My job was to measure the vibration and resulting displacement of the ship’s hull. If a submarine hull vibrates you can bet a 1/16 inch thick 16 inch long 1/2 inch brass tube vibrates.
Ron
I will vote for the position of ambiguity. In associating with many piano technicians (an interesting breed of folk, by the way) I have learned (or learned that I can’t learn) about the bewildering interaction of way too many factors to wrap my mind around.
On the piano, the wood matters. The frame density holds the instrument in tremendous tension, keeping the vibrations from “leaking” away without producing tone. There are about five thousand examples of things like this.
But wind instruments are different, aren’t they, because the instrument is really sort of a container for a column of air?
You know, musicians are taught nothing whatsoever about the physics of music, at least in American university music schools. I do think there was an elective, but it was probably offered by the physics department.
For myself, I hope to own lots of whistles made of lots of stuff. Long live WHOA!
I’m mainly over on the flute board, but I drop by daily to see what’s up here, too, so I think most folk cross-board hop.
Anyway, I think flute design is more of a factor in tone than the material…provided the material is dense enough to contain the air column. For example, everyone who has heard (and seen) my Dixon always thinks it’s blackwood unless I tell them otherwise. I do think different materials need to be thicker/thinner, etc…to get a good tone, and the material does influence the design needed to get a good tone.
However, the biggest factor by far is the player. If you have a well made flute, whatever the material, the player will influence sound more than anything else.
I think most of the above holds true for whistles, too. Look at the good ones - they’re made of wood, metal or polymer.
Yes,it’s the whistle, flute is really just a container
for a column of air argument that the physicisists
give–so the material can’t color the tone by vibrating
in a distinctive way.
Well, the materials do color the tone,
considerably, and the other explanations for why it does
don’t really explain it; so I figure the
materials vibrate.
But I don’t know. But I suspect they don’t either.
Boy, I just read the column – it’s full of inaccuracies and false conclusions. For example, the US does not consider blackwood endangered – the methods of harvest largely unsustainable, yes, but not endangered in 2003, nevermind in 1998 when it was written. She says that rosewood is endangered and is the wood of choice for recorders. I don’t even know if I’ve seen a rosewood recorder; most of them are made from fruitwoods, blackwood, and boxwood. Moreover, there are like a gazillion types of rosewood, it’s possible that the species she mentions is endangered, but most are not, and I think furniture is a much greater threat than recorders.
Also, she uses the term “virtually indistinguishable” for the difference in sound between two flutes when talking about the reaction of a group of people interested in “music and human adaptation.” First, in a large hall not designed for concerts with an audience that consists probably primarily of sociologists or anthropologists, I’m not surprised that nobody noticed a difference. Second, virtually indistinguishable does not equal the same. Third, one of the flutes was concrete, and the assertion is that flutes with similar dimensions and surface finish sound the same – I presume it must have been a pretty crappy wooden flute it was compared to, because you can’t produce a very smooth surface on concrete. The nature of the composite material, the binder, etc., don’t allow it to be polished.
There are other things, too.
This read like an column by someone with an agenda against harvesting wood for instruments, not like an article by a physicist. It certainly did nothing to sway either my opinion that wood does make a difference, nor my opinion of Scheitific American.
One thing I have noticed is a dramatic difference in tone due to wall thickness. Anyone who’s looked closely at an O’Riordan wood whistle, the walls are massive compared to any other whistle. If you take the head joint and put a feadog/Generation type tube on it, the tone changes very dramatically. You can see that even switching a feadog head from a brass to nickel tube. Not as noticeable, but still there.
Tony
Interesting stuff. It reminds me of other Great Whistle Debates, including the whole slobber vs. ambient moisture condensate thing. Ah. Those were the days.
I’m sympathetic to the position that the material has no more than a subtle effect on the tone. I suspect that the differences in tone from material are much more discernible to the player, who holds the instrument…uh…close to…uh..his or her ears. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell it has MUCH impact on how the instrument sounds to a person in the back row.
What we need here is empirical science. Who makes whistles from two very different materials but which are otherwise identical? Burke composites vs. metal—but the design is different. Hm.
The best test would be a two sets of whistles, in pairs, each member of each pair different in material only. Metal vs. wood. And a bunch of blindfolded listeners. Place yer bets, gents.
Thats a good idea Dale but still subjective. Lets take a look at these identical Whistles, except material, on a spectrascope where we can see what the wave form looks like.
Ron
I think we may all be on the same page here, at least several of us are. I’m just suggesting that it doesn’t have NO effect on the sound, not that it has a profound effect. That maybe to a casual observer it can’t be detected, but that to a schooled player, it can be.
One of the arguments in the article was that beyond a certain wall thickness, the material doesn’t vibrate. I just blew a lower-octave G with my Bleazey boxwood flute, which is VERY heavy-walled (and has a pretty delicate sound, not a lot of volume), and could feel the vibrations with my free hand along about half the length of it. (The vibrations can feel exaggerated through your fingers if they’re covering tone hole, so I was feeling the bottom.)
Just curious since I usually have an urge to post similar questions on other boards as well, but fear redundancy.