TUNING digest 1039

Bill Alves writes:
Does anyone know more about or have any references on the acoustics of
flute hole placement? Thanks.

This is the second time I'm going to suggest this book as an answer, but is
the best thing I've seen so far and relatively new. Bart Hopkin's book
Musical Instrument Design (See Sharp Press) gives the best advice I've seen.
A couple of years ago a friend of mine built a copper saxophone and tried to
tune it to 7 tone pseudo-African scale (derived from a kalimba). He spent
months researching, tried Helmholtz's book and other source material. He
eventually gave up and guessed with poor results. There is no one formula
that takes all the factors, such as tonehole diameter, air chamber diameter,
tonehole placement, register holes, hole depth and other factors and gives
neat accurate answers. However, I've never seen as good a list of how each
factor acts and how it affects other factors as Bart's book. On top of that,
he talks of reeds, mouth pieces, materials, gives contact addresses for
materials and suggests many alternate designs. On top of that he gives
similar advice on tuned percussion, strings and just about everything else.
E-mail him at ExpMusInst@aol.com and order the thing if you really want to
build an instrument. Sorry to repeat myself, but it is a very good book.

John Gzowski

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