Kevin. Thanks for clarifying. I have several cocus flutes and agree with you. But I’m not really good enough to have my own sound or anything and I like other woods too. For me, changing woods is a bit like having a tone control on an electric guitar. Sometimes I like the sound to be a bit brighter and other times darker. But in listening to others, I’m generally more drawn to the players who have what might be described as a very rich full sound and most of the big names do at least to my ears.
I want to thank Terry for his page on cocuswood. I must ask if anyone is seriously attempting to properly identify the various woods used on historical examples, given the variability in the naming and sourcing of “cocuswood”? Perhaps microscopic examination of slips from ‘wrecks’? Without a solid ‘chain of custody’ from botanical identification of the living tree to the manufactured flute, we seem to only be left with destructive methods for identification. I wonder if MRI technology can give us enough insight into the micro-structure of various woods for positive identification.
I know a certain amount of uncertainty exists about the ‘boxwood’ R.L. Mealy used, since he sourced much of his wood from old spools and bobbins in the linen factories, which in turn were most often made from dunnage from overseas.
Bob
I do appreciate a variety of tone from the different players/different flutes. The tone I’m most attracted to personally, though, is that of Tom McElvogue on his CD “The Long Hard Road”.
Are you saying that there are tonal differences between blackwood and cocus that can be appreciated by the listner?
Not aware of any new techniques for identification, but I haven’t tried recently. Last time I did any, they needed a thin sliver of endgrain, which is not easy to come by on a flute without incurring the wrath of the owner (the inner end of the cap is about the only possibility). Earlier MRI systems didn’t offer a particularly high resolution, but that’s possibly changed.
Terry
These discussions on tone are always so dependant upon language and our interpretation of it. Darker, lighter, brighter, richer, thinner, fuller, etc. I think it would be really interesting for us to compare our reactions to a few different recordings to see if there is any basis for agreement or if it all falls into the “ear of the beholder” category. We would need to find a few recordings easily accessible via the Web by anybody, then ask listeners to rank them in order of desirable tone colour. Ideally, they would be unaccompanied recordings so we can concentrate fully on the flute. Airs and slow tunes give the listener longer to consider the finer points, but that might not be possible. Modern recordings would be safer than early recordings with possibly limited frequency response. Any suggestions?
Terry
I agree Terry
Different designs and players can make a much bigger difference than the material.
I thought delrin was utter crap for years until I got to play a delrin flute with a good design, I’m not fond of many of the popular makers designs (chimney height is too high - and it stifles the resonance).
But I digress…
Oiling is misunderstood, it doesn’t really help blackwood from cracking and blackwood has about as high as a oil content as cocus (and other true rosewoods). Oiling does make the bore more reflective, both for light and for sound, making it play a bit better… 'til the oil goes away.
Personally, I think our use of language is fine, as long as we use follow-up descriptors for the more ambiguous words. “Dark” is ambiguous, unless followed-up with what the user means by it. Jim’s “clear and bright” was not really all that ambiguous - it implies a bell-like clarity of sound - unless, of course, that’s not what he meant. So I agree with Kevin’s disagreement. If that is what Jim meant, I’m not sure cocus, then, is any more capable of clear and bright than blackwood, or, for that matter, Delrin - maybe more-so than boxwood, but that’s not always true, either - really depends on both the flute itself (its maker, embouchure, bore, witchcraft, etc.), and - most significantly, the player.
That some very, very good flutes were made from cocus says more about the sound now associated with the wood than the wood itself.
Yes, I think you pretty well capture what I mean, except ‘bell like clarity’ is a bit more clear and bright than I had in mind.
For me, blackwood has a darker sound. I don’t particularly prefer one to the other; also I rather think that this may be
a matter of what’s heard ‘under the ear’ of the musician, more than the audience.
Anyhow some people have remarked in this thread that, all other things being equal, they prefer playing cocus to
blackwood. It would be interesting if they would say why.
I thought the scientific evidence was in that the material the fute’s made of doesn’t matter???
Best wishes,
Keith.
Science is one thing, firmly held opinions are another… 
Best wishes.
Steve
Wink, wink indeed, Steve … LOL
Best,
Keith.
Materials may not matter, but I can’t help wondering if a maker working on very rare wood pays extra attention and care, and this leads to a preference based on the seen variable (wood) when it’s actually an unseen variable (care in making). Just a thought.
Hugh
Good point Hugh Fruitfly!
So what about the masterfully crafted Tipple?
It’s produced by a musical technician of the highest quality - in pvc. We’re told that scientifically pvc is as good as any other flute material. After that it depends on the skill of the craftsman and the player.
Depending on what emphasis you put on whatever attributes you demand of your flutes, does it stand up there with the best for honking low D, Prattenesque volume, tuning, flexibility, response, ease of play, maintenance, durability, good looks, and, finally but most importantly, voice and range by which all such flutes should be judged?
I have two small holed cocus flutes. They are sweet and full bodied but don’t have the Tipple volume, tone hole spacing, ease of maintenance or durability. If they were Tipple-made cocus flutes would the issue of the material they were made of even arise?
Best wishes,
Keith.
And if they made plumbing pipe out of cocus, we’d probably know the answer…
Best wishes.
Steve
My office, NOW, Bliven!
I don’t think we should go that far. There have been multiple studies proving that the metal a flute is made from has no discernible bearing on the tone (providing we’re not talking mercury at room temperature!), but there’s been no serious study as far as I can remember into differing woods. We do know that it’s the air inside that does the vibrating, not the container, but if the container is a poor container, we could reasonably expect it to influence the vibrating air column. Whether the only possible influence is negative we don’t know. It could be for example that blackwood is less “perfect” than delrin, but more acceptable.
I made a keyless Prattens out of pinus radiata, our local plantation construction timber. It was pretty ghastly as you might expect. Indeed, until loaded up with oil, I couldn’t play below A because of the distributed leakage. Before the oil, I could breath through the flute with all the holes plugged. With the oil it was still a “light-sounding” flute, like a thin-walled bamboo flute. It’s probably no coincidence that European makers have always seemed to use the densest, finest woods they could acquire and that their technology could work. Of significance to this discussion, cocuswood and blackwood are about the same density. There may be differences in fineness, but we’d probably need an electron microscope to be really sure.
Terry
Sincere question, Terry. How do we know the container isn’t vibrating some along with the column of air inside it, which is doing most of the vibrating?
It almost certainly is, but probably not enough to hear.
Hey, enough with this “almost certainly” and “probably”, you sez, quite reasonably. “Yes or no?”, you insist.
OK (mutter, mutter), I sez, let’s find out…
I hooked a piezo instrument bug up to my computer audio analysis system via a DI (Direct Injection) box, put the bug on my guitar bridge and set the gain for full recording level on normal guitar playing. Played it back - typical bug sound, but not a bad representation.
I then put the bug on the side of my flute and recorded while I played. I was a bit surprised at how high the levels were during recording - not much less than the guitar! But playing it back, I realised why. I could hear the flute, but it was low level and distant sounding. What was causing the high peaks on the recording meters were my finger falls. It sounded like a bad step dancer with clogs on.
So then I recorded a long G note, being careful to hold the flute as still as possible. The note came out at about 40dB below peak level, i.e. 100 times less energy than the peak guitar belly vibration.
So yes, it appears that the vibrating air inside the flute does move the flute body a little, as you’d expect. But not much, as you’d also expect. Flute bodies are made of the densest wood, 4mm thick, in a naturally strong circular shape. And even when you get them moving, they are thin and have little capacity to transmit their vibrations to the surrounding air, in order that we might hear them. By comparison, the guitar belly is big, flat, thin and light - easily moved and effective at pumping air.
And with the flute, since we are also hearing the powerful vibrating air column directly, it’s unlikely that the tiny contribution re-radiated from the body would add anything significant. With the guitar, the strings are thin and unlikely to move much air, and rely on the soundboard to make the vibration audible.
Another indication is my fingerfalls. They dominated the vibration recording, but are not normally noticeable as I play. If they can’t move enough air to be audible, how could the much smaller musical vibrations?
I think this experiment confirms that re-radiation from the flute is unlikely to influence flute tone, but that’s not to say the material of the flute body couldn’t influence the sound in other ways, eg by absorption or friction. But we’d expect the biggest differences to come from woods with the most different properties. Cocuswood and blackwood are very similar, and so I wouldn’t expect a lot of difference, everything else being equal.
Terry
I agree with everything you’ve written in this helpful post. Here’s a thought/speculation, FWIW.
The flute wood does vibrate, we agree, and also it doesn’t radiate sound mechanically through the environment,
as a guitar would, for the reasons you have aptly summarized. Still the vibration of the flute cylinder, which contains the
vibrating airstream, contains and somewhat affects the latter, so that it thereby colours the flute’s sound. Different woods vibrate
differently, hence the airstream in the flute is affected differently and so the flutes have a somewhat different sound due
to the different woods. This provides a ‘mechanism’ by which different woods produce somewhat different sounds, but not
in the way that they do in guitars et al. So rosewood guitars (back and sides) sing, there is an acoustic quality to rosewood,
and flutes made of rosewood (IMO) have a related singing sound. The vibrating rosewood in the guitar colours the sound
by directly radiating sound through the environment; the vibrating rosewood in the flute colours sound by conditioning the column of air in the flute. Both sound like rosewood, the flute less dramatically but still often audibly.
(ch. 3 from TheCritique of Pure Drool)
If it is the case that flute woods could be shown to influence the sound, we’d need to consider carefully which mechanisms are the most likely. You’ve stated one of the possibilities - vibration in the container affecting the vibration in the air which initially caused the vibration in the container. The small amount of vibration detected still argues against that.
Getting back to guitars, the effects of the back and sides is regarded as being more reflective than resonant, i.e. stiff. So a dense wood like rosewood is appropriate here, whereas vibratory sections like the soundboard and ribs are more typically spruce, pine or cedar. Given that the back is usually pressed up against the player’s body, and the sides are undulating, there is little scope for vibration of these sections. Stiffness is what we expect of a flute body too.
Perhaps more attractive is that it’s an absorption thing - that even despite the density of the material, some energy is lost into it or through it. Delrin flutes do appear more efficient than blackwood flutes, and blackwood flutes more efficient than boxwood flutes (densities 1.4 to 1.2 to 1.0) so this suggests there are losses, and perhaps these losses are not linear over the harmonic range.
Another possibility is that it’s a surface thing, and that one breaks down into two possibilities (or a combination of them). One is the nature of the surface of the whole bore, and there is quite a bit of that. The other is the nature of the surface of points of constriction, eg at the embouchure hole and the first open hole. There is less of that, but the oscillatory air velocity at these points is very much higher, and so the effect might reasonably be more.
Perhaps before we wax too speculative though, we should try to answer the question is there a perceptible difference in sound between these closely similar woods!
Terry