21C-Orch-Instrs Resume (2)

Resume of Instrument Researches No 2

In Paris I met a young researcher working on a new woowind instrument.
The details of this are still under wraps, so I can't say too much about
it... However, essentially, the new woodwind is a wooden tube blown
through a fipple-(recorder)-type mouthpiece (or potentially some kind of
conventional single or double reed). There are no tone-holes drilled
through the side of the bore of the tube... but there are a series of
electronic keys on outside of the bore. There's a very clever peice of
hardware inside the bore which is controlled by the electronic keys...
as you blow the instrument and press the electronic keys the sounding
pitch _and_ the timbre of the instrument can be varied.... Wow!!! The
pitches produced can potentially be very accurate... and in any tuning
system. This system is NOT the same principal as that used by Giles
Brindley in the Logical Bassoon, or Howard McGill's Clarinet (see my
paper for those who didn't see these in my lecturese etc). Neverthless,
the sound is acoustic... that is, the sound is coming from within the
wooden tube.... The new instrument is still very much a prototype.

My thanks, and astonishment, go to its inventor, who, unfortunately, is
probably not on the list...
--
Patrick Ozzard-Low,
http://www.c21-orch-instrs.demon.co.uk
mailto: pol@c21-orch-instrs.demon.co.uk
Tel : (44) 1603 614380