Peter Hoekje's MUSICAL ACOUSTICS Page
Flute Spreadsheets
This spreadsheet is intended to partially automate
the
design of tonehole layouts for woodwinds, by calculating the effective
length
corrections for bores with tone holes. As it is, it is set up for a
cylindrical
PVC flute that plays an F major scale, using 6 or 7 holes. Please note
that
I have left you a little work to do... the hole sizes given are too
small
and therefore the "local cutoff frequency" is too low, resulting
in a flat second register. As an assignment in our Acoustics course,
the
students have to fix this defect, while designing a tone hole layout that fits their own fingers. Given a scale of target frequencies and hole sizes, the spreadsheet calculates the best positions (if possible) for the holes in order to play in tune. The designer can change the hole sizes and see where the holes end up. It may also be adapted
for
other scales or other woodwinds, as you wish. If you have any problems with the file or questions about the acoustics, drop me a line at phoekje@bw.edu.
At Baldwin Wallace University, students in PHY101 Acoustics have to design
and build their own flutes during two 2-hour lab periods. Here
are the instructions for these labs, in Adobe PDF format.
Flute Design
Flute
Construction
Other
Air column resonance demonstrations,
handout to a paper given by U. Hansen and P. Hoekje at the 136th
meeting
of the Acoustical Society of America, Norfolk, VA, October 1998,
includes
instructions for a simple impedance head that can be made from low cost
parts and used in conjunction with a computer sound card for
explorations
into the acoustics of tubes and wind instruments. I gave a slightly updated version of this
talk
at Stanford/CCRMA in January 2006.
Sound files containing "chirps": flat
from 100 to 5000 Hz; and pre-compensated by -6dB/8va for use with
piezoelectric
drivers, in the following frequency ranges: 100-3000Hz,
100-4000Hz, 100-5000Hz,
200-3000Hz, 200-4000Hz,
200-5000Hz, 500-1000Hz,
500-2000Hz, 500-5000Hz,
and a brief explanation.
Wind Instrument Network Analysis
The following python scripts calculate the input admittance or input impedance of air columns.
They are best run using Python 3 and will require NumPy and Matplotlib
ZModuleV07
FangufanguV13