photo – flute

Posted on | November 17, 2009 | 2 Comments

Little did I know what a load of abuse of the ‘Flute Polisher’ variety would follow. It’s as well I didn’t publish a photo of pheasant plucking …

It might prove useful for the song Mellow sort of dream. then again …

A quote from the BBC guide

Sometimes the flute is made of real silver, sometimes of solid gold!

To play, the musician holds the long tube of the flute in both hands and blows across a small hole at one end. The holes can be opened and closed by pressing down different metal keys. The flute can make a shrill, piercing noise as well as being able to sing like a bird.

A flute produces sound when a stream of air directed across a hole in the instrument creates a vibration of air at the hole.

The air stream across this hole creates a Bernoulli, or siphon, effect leading to a von Karman vortex street. This excites the air contained in the usually cylindrical resonant cavity within the flute. The player changes the pitch of the sound produced by opening and closing holes in the body of the instrument, thus changing the effective length of the resonator and its corresponding resonant frequency. By varying the air pressure, a flute player can also change the pitch of a note by causing the air in the flute to resonate at a harmonic other than the fundamental frequency without opening or closing any holes.

To be louder, a flute must use a larger resonator, a larger air stream, or increased air stream velocity. A flute’s volume can generally be increased by making its resonator and tone holes larger. This is why a police whistle, a form of flute, is very wide for its pitch, and why a pipe organ can be far louder than a concert flute: a large organ pipe can contain several cubic feet of air, and its tone hole may be several inches wide, while a concert flute’s air stream measures a fraction of an inch across.

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