source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 02:04:48 -0700 Subject: Re: Neanderthal flute From: mr88cet@texas.net (Gary Morrison) >Not to beat this bone flute thing to extinction, Harhar. >Now I have a Balinese suling (bamboo flute) that plays a pretty reasonable >major scale if you lift up your fingers one at a time ... >Yet the physical distance >between the second and third holes is almost the same as the distance >between the other holes. I'd wager that they're also xdifferent diameters too. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the larger a tonehole is, the more it behaves like cutting the tube off entirely. A small tonehole lets the vibration extend farther down the tube than a larger tonehole, thereby making the pitch flatter. >he says that hole >placement has the same relationship to frequency as string length does. >That would seem to indicate that the holes would have to get closer >together to preserve the same interval between them. That is true. Theobald Boehm, the inventor of the modern flute, in his book as translated and extensively commented by Dayton C. Miller (Dover publication, if still available), characterized the placement of flute toneholes as like frets on a string, but - essentially - with the embouchure hole closer to the end of the tube than the bridge of the string would be. Back when I was in high school, I did a science fair project to study flute acoustics and thereby design and build 10TET flutes. In that investigation, I found that that prescription really didn't work. The toneholes ended up having to be spread out farther apart than that. >Does anyone know more about or have any references on the acoustics of >flute hole placement? The easiest way to place holes on a woodwind, I think I've concluded, is to make a test instrument with essentially arbitrarily-placed holes, play a scale up the tube precisely measuring the pitch of each hole. You can then plot those as distance/pitch pairs to form a "calibration curve". That is to say, you can connect the dots and smooth the curve to make it continuous, and then use that curve to run the process backward: Look up from the calibration curve, the lengths that match whatever pitches you want, and then build an instrument of otherwise identical dimensions, with holes where you looked them up on the curve. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 11:08 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA02121; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 11:08:02 +0200 Received: from ella.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA02119 Received: from by ella.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) id CAA11082; Tue, 8 Apr 1997 02:06:31 -0700 Date: Tue, 8 Apr 1997 02:06:31 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@ella.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@ella.mills.edu