An acoustical history of lip-excited musical wind instruments
Résumé
From the conch shell and the cow horn to the modern orchestral brass section, lip-excited aerophones have played a central role in human music-making. Until the middle of the twentieth century the evolution and sophistication of brass instruments proceeded through a process of trial and error. In recent decades theoretical, experimental and computational scientific methods have been used to study the dynamics and aeroacoustics of sound production in lip-excited instruments. While considerable advances have been made in understanding the physics of the coupling between the lips of the player and the acoustic modes of the resonating tube, and the effects of bore profile on sound propagation and radiation, success in applying this knowledge in the improvement of brass instrument design has been hampered by uncertainty as to the specification of musically relevant targets for optimisation. This question can be illuminated by considering the relationship between musical function and acoustical behaviour in instruments of earlier periods. The approach is illustrated by brief acoustical histories of two lip-excited instruments: the trombone and the serpent.
Domaines
Acoustique [physics.class-ph]
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