I know this may be the stupidest question ever posted on this site, but what exactly is “chiff” anyways? I know what a fipple is.
Is it that “airy”, overtone-rich quality found on whistles and wood flutes? Or does it have to do with a style of play or a tonal quality that a player produces regardless of the instrument? Maybe it’s just a whistle thing (are we fluters, in point of fact, just ancillary members of this board?) and has nothing to do with wood flutes. Don’t know exactly…
VII. AT LAST: Clearer Definition of Chiff
Hello Dale,
On the C&F FAQ page, you have a definition of “chiff”. I stumbled across a couple of definitions of “chiff”, as it applies to pipe organs, and thought I’d pass them along. (I don’t know if this will clarify, or muddy it even more.)
Chiff
Pipes that have a clear edge to the sound are often described as having “chiff.” Any kind of pipe can have chiff but principals almost always have this clear attack point.
Attack Point: The moment at which the pipe begins to speak, when the key is pressed, is the attack point. Different kinds of pipes have a variety of attack points ranging from soft to strong and clear.
We all know about “Chiff”. It is the little incise or transient that an organ pipe gives out naturally when it begins its tone. The chiff sounds like "KAA. . . " and sometimes “CHAA. . .” or even “SHAA.” With too little wind it takes on a tubercular quality, a kind of cough. In E. Power Biggs’s words, the chiff is the consonant that precedes the vowel. Using his metaphor it is easy to show that the chiff, or something like it, is essential to articulateness–for: Who ever heard of articulation without consonants? Some form of chiff was present in all the early organs.
Regards,
Paul Petty
My own recent stab at a description, consistent with what Jon C. posted:
http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?p=733815#733815
I guess transverse flutes can exhibit transients, too, but it’s really more a duct flute / fipple flute thing, and a desirable quality in many whistles.
I think the example of the pipe organ goes a long way toward demonstrating just what “chiff” could be. It seems that a silent organ pipe has a static, standing column of air in it, as a resistance, and that chiff occurs at the moment when, at the push of one of the organ’s keys, air under pressure overcomes the resistance of that static air. However, chiff then diminishes, or even ceases, once that organ tube’s air column is in motion, as no longer static.
Even though a flute’s tube could be quite smaller than many of a pipe organ’s tubes, moreover, a flute is a tube, too, and by a process similar to an organ tube, apparently chiff could be developed in a flute, too.
However, perhaps it could also be said of flute chiff, that chiff likely could not be developed by the introduction to the flute of a “weak” air stream, that it takes a “strong” air stream to produce chiff. That is, relative to the flute, perhaps chiff could not only be defined as 1) a quality of sound, but could also be defined as 2) a quality of a player, in that the player needs to be relatively more aggressive in their application of air to the flute. Or, in other words, “hot” players get chiff!
Chiff is short for chiffchaff, a kind of bird. Listen to its song:
http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/birds/chiffchaff.htm
And all this time I thought it had something to do with insufficient lubrication.
All right then, what do you call that breathy sound that you can hear on so many whistles and always on any flute I happen to be playing, whether I want it or not, and I don’t, and is it desireable or should it be eliminated, and if so, how? Try saying that at normal speed in one breath. I think I read somewhere that the breathiness is a characteristic of folk fluting, while its absence smacks of classical usage.
On the flute the breathiness that troubles you is likely poor embouchure. Not sure about what would cause that on whistle, except perhaps poor breath control.
I believe it si called “playing dirty”
Do your ears agree? Frankly, I find that I more often hear classical players that I’d describe as breathy than irish players, at least as far as the (presumably) higher level players go.
I don’t think there’s a generally agreed-upon term, except breathiness.
I sometimes use the terms Chuff and Chaff for the continuous noise components, as opposed to transient and momentary Chiff.
Chuff = The overall breathiness or wind noise.
Chaff = The high frequency inharmonic noise, perceived as “scratchiness”.
Yeah, it’s kind of cute, but useful. 
For what it is worth, my broader more summative definition of chiff is: all the sound a flute or whistle makes that isn’t the note itself. Works for me.
Clark
I’ve always subscribed to the “attack point” theory about what chiff is. I use words like overtones, harmonics, scratchiness, breathiness, etc, to describe the various other sound components of a note.
There’s a sizable percentage of C&Fers who use Clark’s definition.
“Chiff” is the Irish version of the British admonition, as in keeping a Chiff upper lip, which is necessary to play a flute properly.
Chuckle…