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. The spreadsheet may also be adapted
for
other scales or other woodwinds, as you wish. The same spreadsheet has
been
saved in different formats for your convenience; if you can't read any
of
these, drop me a line at phoekje@bw.edu.
At Baldwin-Wallace College, 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.