Recent progress in the acoustics of wind instruments

Abstract

Progress made over the past decade in understanding the mechanisms of sound production in music wind instruments is reviewed. The behavior of air columns, horns, and fingerholes is now fairly well understood, and most recent interest centers on details of the sound generator - the reed in woodwinds, the lips in brass instruments, and the air jet in flute-family instruments. Not only do these generators produce the sound, but they are also largely responsible, through their nonlinearity, for controlling the harmonic content and thus the musical timbre of the instrument, the one major exception being in loud playing on brass instruments where propagation nonlinearities in the air column are also important. Despite considerable progress, there remain important and interesting questions to be answered.