i have been interested in the possible sounds and physics of the human voice for a long time. the last few years that interest has come to include wind instruments. there are many kinds of wind instruments, but the kind that i'm writing of today are the brass, or lip-reeds as they are also known. this includes everything from the cornett to the cornet, alphorn to the digeridu.
what is intriguing about the brass family is that it takes something that babies do, "buzzing" with their lips and turns it into music. apparently making rude noises is not rude after all, provided you do it down a long pipe! the physics (acoustics) that describe the making of music by..... ahem.... doing whatever you want to call it... down a pipe, are relatively straight forward. greatly simplified, the fundamental (lowest note) is determined buy the length of the pipe. other notes that can be played are multiples of this frequency. this doesn't give us many notes to play with (bugle, natural trumpet). so what do we do? drill holes, make valves, do anything we can to make it possible to change the length of the pipe on the fly while we're playing! this way we can fill in the notes that we were missing before.
in the end, the way that the pipe, the mouthpiece and the bell (if that instrument has one), all work together to change our rude lip noises into something interesting and beautiful to hear. something worthy of donning good clothes and paying money to see and hear. something that doesn't make us laugh out loud when we see men and women in formal tuxes and gowns performing. behold, the brass instrument!
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