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A scientific fact/tidbit you recently learned that you thought was interesting

alfaniner said:
But then, I encounter trumpet players in my own band that have been playing 50 years or more that don't know that their Concert B-flat is actually a C for their instrument's notation. I.E., when he plays a C, the note is actually a B-flat when played on a piano or other "concert" instrument.
I even made an app where you can choose to play notes, chords (tetrachords), and scales. I'm really proud of it but had basically zero downloads. It's no longer available.
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The saxophone family shows this the best. The basic saxophone that everyone knows - the one that goes up after the bit you blow in then down, which is the bit you hold, then up again for the end - is the tenor saxophone and it is tuned to Bb. In other words, a Bb played on a tenor sax is a concert C. The next smaller saxophone is the alto sax, which is in Eb. And it switches between them going up and down the sizes - the soprano sax above the alto is in Bb, the baritone sax below the tenor is in Eb. Technically there are nine different sizes of saxophone, but really only these four are in general use.

One of my music teachers had a C melody sax, which used to be popular but are quite rare now.
 
a_unique_person said:
The clarinet is particularly strange. It can do three octaves, which makes it versatile, but in the highest range the notes have different fingerings to the other two octaves.
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That's not actually all that unusual. I never played clarinet, but oboe and flute also have different fingerings for the higher registers. It's something something because you have to overblow to get a higher harmonic wave.
 
arthwollipot said:
Well, the linked video goes into pretty good detail in plain English. I really don't know that I could do a better job of it. But here goes:

Do-Re-Mi is what is called a diatonic scale. You have seven notes before the first one repeats in a higher register. The top and the bottom are both called Do because the higher one is double the frequency of the lower one. They sound like the same note - if you play the two together there is no harmony, there is just one note. It's called an octave because there are eight notes in a diatonic scale.

However, there are notes between the Do-Re-Mi. There's a note halfway between Do and Re. Do-and-a-half if you like. For this reason we will be swapping to the traditional letters to refer to the notes. Don't ask why it starts at C. (quick answer: it doesn't always)

Do = C (a deer, a female deer)
Re = D (a drop of golden sun)
Mi = E (a name I call myself)
Fa = F (a long long way to run)
So = G (a needle pulling thread)
La = A (a note to follow So (cop out!))
Ti = B (a drink with jam and bread)
Do = C' (an octave higher)

The note halfway between C and D is either C sharp or D flat. Sharp means a half-step up, and we use the hash symbol for it: #. So C# is C-sharp and is halfway between C and D. Flat means a half-step down, and we use a special symbol that is approximated in text by a lower case b. So Db is half way between D and C. So in fact there are more than 8 notes. For reasons that are complicated, E# = F and Fb = E. Similarly, B# = C and Cb = B. You'll need to accept that without explanation - it just is. So this means that there are in fact 12 notes in the scale.

Now, in Equal Temperament, which was only widely adopted in the 18th century, the frequency of C# is exactly halfway between C and D. So C# = Db always. In previous systems of tuning, this was not the case.

Remember how I said you shouldn't ask why it starts at C? Okay, now you can ask. Starting at C means you are in the key of C, but you can be in other keys. This means that while the intervals (distances) between notes are the same, you start at a different note. So this is Do-Re-Mi in D. Notice that you can only get the same intervals by using sharps. In the key of D it is traditional to use sharps and not flats.

Do = D
Re = E
Mi = F#
Fa = G
So = A
La = B
Ti = C#
Do = D'

Being in the key of D means that most (but not all) of the notes you will be playing come from this scale. If I were going to be precise, this is the key of D major, but that's not important right now. Know that there is also a D minor, in which the intervals between the notes are not the same.

Prior to Equal Temperament, an instrument was tuned so that this particular key was most harmonious, at the expense of other keys not being harmonious at all. If you wanted to play in a different key, you had to retune your instrument. Not particularly difficult for wind instruments, tedious and time consuming for stringed instruments, and all but impossible for keyboard instruments. Under these systems (and there were a variety of them) C# was not the same as Db.

J.S. Bach's 1722 collection The Well-Tempered Clavier was in essence a demonstration of how under Equal Temperament, a single instrument could play in all keys. It consists of a prelude and a fugue (those are musical structures or forms) in each of the major and minor keys, so 24 preludes-and-fugues all together. And then there are two books so in fact it's 48. It's beautiful - I recommend it.
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Thank you for this explanation.

I've tried to follow the Youtube, but he lost me at the overtones.
Well, not the concept of the overtones, but then what he called them. (at about 4:50 in the video)
From f1 to f2 it is an octave. I can see that, there are 2 waves and thus the tone should be an octave higher. I get that.
But then he calls the f4 overtone a fourth, where this should also be called an octave, as here we have 4 waves on the string, and thus the tone should be twice as high as the F2 and 4 times as high as the f1.
But suddenly it is not an octave anymore? It is things like this that make music so difficult to follow. There are definitions, but after a while these are simply changed into something else, without explaining why this is.
(hah! Attaching screenshots does work! :))
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Edit:
And then he puts them in a complete different order as what is explained above. :oops:
Major confusion in my head here.
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arthwollipot said:
The saxophone family shows this the best. The basic saxophone that everyone knows - the one that goes up after the bit you blow in then down, which is the bit you hold, then up again for the end - is the tenor saxophone and it is tuned to Bb. In other words, a Bb played on a tenor sax is a concert C. The next smaller saxophone is the alto sax, which is in Eb. And it switches between them going up and down the sizes - the soprano sax above the alto is in Bb, the baritone sax below the tenor is in Eb. Technically there are nine different sizes of saxophone, but really only these four are in general use.

One of my music teachers had a C melody sax, which used to be popular but are quite rare now.
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The tenor sax is my instrument of over 25 years. Part of my initial curiosity was why the alto music was in a different key.
a_unique_person said:
The clarinet is particularly strange. It can do three octaves, which makes it versatile, but in the highest range the notes have different fingerings to the other two octaves.
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The tenor sax is similar. I never really even learned how to use the higher note keys because my band music never called for them. There are also alternate fingerings for a few notes. It's a complicated instrument, with all those keys and rods!
 
Multi-woodwind player from back in my school days. I dabbled for a while at bassoon, until I felt I'd properly atoned for my sins and stopped.
 
a_unique_person said:
The clarinet is particularly strange. It can do three octaves, which makes it versatile, but in the highest range the notes have different fingerings to the other two octaves.
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That would be why I just had a bass clarinet player insist I re-score the woodwind parts by opening up a repeat and writing it out, rather than just noting "play repeat an octave lower". He demonstrated someting weird with a couple of keys and said, it doesn't work like your thing - pointing to my flute.

People, problems.

It was a reasonable request, but a month ago would have been a good time. The concert is tomorrow.
 
erwinl said:
Thank you for this explanation.

I've tried to follow the Youtube, but he lost me at the overtones.
Well, not the concept of the overtones, but then what he called them. (at about 4:50 in the video)
From f1 to f2 it is an octave. I can see that, there are 2 waves and thus the tone should be an octave higher. I get that.
But then he calls the f4 overtone a fourth, where this should also be called an octave, as here we have 4 waves on the string, and thus the tone should be twice as high as the F2 and 4 times as high as the f1.
But suddenly it is not an octave anymore? It is things like this that make music so difficult to follow. There are definitions, but after a while these are simply changed into something else, without explaining why this is.

...

And then he puts them in a complete different order as what is explained above. :oops:
Major confusion in my head here.
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Because that's not the sequence it follows.

Music is often lauded as being strictly mathematical but in fact it isn't. A lot of what makes up music is arbitrary and only done because it's "traditional". Looking for reasons why some of it is the way it is is futile, mostly because it became the way it is long before any music was ever written down (standardised musical notation was only introduced in the 17th-18th centuries). Some things you just have to memorise and learn by rote, unfortunately.

As a trombone player I learned the harmonic sequence intimately. It starts with the fundamental - which for a regular tenor trombone is a low Bb, a note which is rarely actually played because it's a little difficult. Most learning is done at the first harmonic, which is a Bb an octave above that. The next harmonic up is an F, then the next Bb, now two octaves above the fundamental. The next harmonic is another F, but it's not actually in tune. It's a little bit sharp. When you play it you have to detune it a tiny amount with the slide. This is because brass instruments are not tuned to Equal Temperament. They play the harmonic series that the physical construction of the instrument gives you. All brass instruments have this sharp fourth harmonic. In valved instruments like trumpets and horns, each valve has its own little tuning slide, and you hold your instrument with your finger in the loop attached to the slide so that you can make this adjustment on the fly.
 
EHocking said:
Or F1 with a bunch of racing fans, or Armageddon with a bunch of oilfield workers, or Gran Turismo with a bunch of gamers/geeks/nerds
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Or Armageddon with anyone who knows anything about science.
arthwollipot said:
Because that's not the sequence it follows.

Music is often lauded as being strictly mathematical but in fact it isn't. A lot of what makes up music is arbitrary and only done because it's "traditional".
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"If it sounds good, it is good." -- Duke Ellington
 
alfaniner said:
"If it sounds good, it is good." -- Duke Ellington
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Who was it who said that Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds? My second favourite bit of musical criticism, after the Emperor telling Mozart that the Marriage of Figaro had too many notes in it.
 
a_unique_person said:
There is a science to it if you analyse the harmonics of a single single note played on an instrument they will include the 5th and the 3rd, for example.
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There's a lot more than that. I also studied electronic music, and one of the subjects was how you could turn a sine wave into other kinds of wave by adding harmonics to it. Eg. if you add only odd-numbered harmonics, you approach a square wave (you'd have to add an infinite number of them to reach a square wave exactly). Basically every sound that comes out of an electronic synthesiser is a sine wave with added harmonics.
 
arthwollipot said:
There's a lot more than that. I also studied electronic music, and one of the subjects was how you could turn a sine wave into other kinds of wave by adding harmonics to it. Eg. if you add only odd-numbered harmonics, you approach a square wave (you'd have to add an infinite number of them to reach a square wave exactly). Basically every sound that comes out of an electronic synthesiser is a sine wave with added harmonics.
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There will now be a long, increasingly technical, discussion on the application of Fourier Analysis to musical instrument sounds and so forth... :eek:
 
Just come out of a 90-minute rehearsal for tomorrow's service of nine lessons and carols. Our musical director is the (retired) professor of musical acoustics at Edinburgh uni. I need a lie-down.
 
Here is something about music that people don’t talk about much. Echoes. The type of music you can play in a room depends on how much longer the music takes to go to the walls and then to the ear as compared to just straight from the instrument to the ear. If there is a delay between the music being her directly and it’s echo, then you cannot change the pitch very much. So you get music like church music. You can only play music like rock music where the pitch changes quickly when there’s no echo or the echo comes very quickly.
 
rjh01 said:
Here is something about music that people don’t talk about much. Echoes. The type of music you can play in a room depends on how much longer the music takes to go to the walls and then to the ear as compared to just straight from the instrument to the ear. If there is a delay between the music being her directly and it’s echo, then you cannot change the pitch very much. So you get music like church music. You can only play music like rock music where the pitch changes quickly when there’s no echo or the echo comes very quickly.
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The settings on my reverb and delay pedals suggest that is not strictly true.
 
rjh01 said:
Here is something about music that people don’t talk about much. Echoes. The type of music you can play in a room depends on how much longer the music takes to go to the walls and then to the ear as compared to just straight from the instrument to the ear. If there is a delay between the music being her directly and it’s echo, then you cannot change the pitch very much. So you get music like church music. You can only play music like rock music where the pitch changes quickly when there’s no echo or the echo comes very quickly.
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Our musical director stands in various places in a new venue taking readings on some sort of instrument and looking pensive .
 
Rolfe said:
Our musical director stands in various places in a new venue taking readings on some sort of instrument and looking pensive .
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My dad tells a story about an acoustics professor at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) who would assess an auditorium by walking out into the middle, clapping loudly once, and listening to how it reverberated.
 
rjh01 said:
Here is something about music that people don’t talk about much. Echoes. The type of music you can play in a room depends on how much longer the music takes to go to the walls and then to the ear as compared to just straight from the instrument to the ear. If there is a delay between the music being her directly and it’s echo, then you cannot change the pitch very much. So you get music like church music. You can only play music like rock music where the pitch changes quickly when there’s no echo or the echo comes very quickly.
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Since there are some very fast organ pieces it's not so much about the pitch changing, but about harmonising with the reverberations. Also, because they are loud, they set up resonances in other pipes and structures. So the sound of a pipe organ is extremely complex and multilayered.

This is, of course, the best organ piece ever written:


Here's another thing about church organs. Prior to electronic control, where pressing a key activates an electrical mechanism that opens or closes the various pipes, there was a delay between pressing a key and hearing the sound. So an organist had to constantly play ahead of the music.
 
You speak as if that is a thing consigned to the past. Such organs still exist. Now add on that the organ may be at the other end of a large church from the choir +/- orchestra, and I think these guys are superhuman.
 
Of course they do. I didn't mean to imply that non-electronic organs no longer existed. A church organ isn't just an instrument, it's architecture.
 
I am entirely in agreement with lovers of Bach and the great organs and the great organists, but with due respect, I submit that the famous tocatta is not quite the greatest organ work there is, because Bach wrote one and only one passacaglia and fugue. He never wrote another, because he didn't need to. He did indeed write some very fine stuff, and if tocattas are to your liking I suggest you dig up thr "dorian" one too. But I still contend that the passacaglia tops them all. On the web, a good bet here is Lionel Rogg. The version I first wore out was a bargain LP with Michael Schneider, which can also be found on the web.

I am away from home and using a terribly clumsy tablet, so please excuse typos and laziness in links. For the Dorian tocatta, though, I suggest either Luciano Zecca or, again, the relatively poor transcription of the old Schneider LP.
 
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arthwollipot said:
Well, the linked video goes into pretty good detail in plain English. I really don't know that I could do a better job of it. But here goes:

Do-Re-Mi is what is called a diatonic scale. You have seven notes before the first one repeats in a higher register. The top and the bottom are both called Do because the higher one is double the frequency of the lower one. They sound like the same note - if you play the two together there is no harmony, there is just one note. It's called an octave because there are eight notes in a diatonic scale.

However, there are notes between the Do-Re-Mi. There's a note halfway between Do and Re. Do-and-a-half if you like. For this reason we will be swapping to the traditional letters to refer to the notes. Don't ask why it starts at C. (quick answer: it doesn't always)

Do = C (a deer, a female deer)
Re = D (a drop of golden sun)
Mi = E (a name I call myself)
Fa = F (a long long way to run)
So = G (a needle pulling thread)
La = A (a note to follow So (cop out!))
Ti = B (a drink with jam and bread)
Do = C' (an octave higher)

The note halfway between C and D is either C sharp or D flat. Sharp means a half-step up, and we use the hash symbol for it: #. So C# is C-sharp and is halfway between C and D. Flat means a half-step down, and we use a special symbol that is approximated in text by a lower case b. So Db is half way between D and C. So in fact there are more than 8 notes. For reasons that are complicated, E# = F and Fb = E. Similarly, B# = C and Cb = B. You'll need to accept that without explanation - it just is. So this means that there are in fact 12 notes in the scale.

Now, in Equal Temperament, which was only widely adopted in the 18th century, the frequency of C# is exactly halfway between C and D. So C# = Db always. In previous systems of tuning, this was not the case.

Remember how I said you shouldn't ask why it starts at C? Okay, now you can ask. Starting at C means you are in the key of C, but you can be in other keys. This means that while the intervals (distances) between notes are the same, you start at a different note. So this is Do-Re-Mi in D. Notice that you can only get the same intervals by using sharps. In the key of D it is traditional to use sharps and not flats.

Do = D
Re = E
Mi = F#
Fa = G
So = A
La = B
Ti = C#
Do = D'

Being in the key of D means that most (but not all) of the notes you will be playing come from this scale. If I were going to be precise, this is the key of D major, but that's not important right now. Know that there is also a D minor, in which the intervals between the notes are not the same.

Prior to Equal Temperament, an instrument was tuned so that this particular key was most harmonious, at the expense of other keys not being harmonious at all. If you wanted to play in a different key, you had to retune your instrument. Not particularly difficult for wind instruments, tedious and time consuming for stringed instruments, and all but impossible for keyboard instruments. Under these systems (and there were a variety of them) C# was not the same as Db.

J.S. Bach's 1722 collection The Well-Tempered Clavier was in essence a demonstration of how under Equal Temperament, a single instrument could play in all keys. It consists of a prelude and a fugue (those are musical structures or forms) in each of the major and minor keys, so 24 preludes-and-fugues all together. And then there are two books so in fact it's 48. It's beautiful - I recommend it.
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Does this apply to other traditions such as Chinese music, though? That always sounds to me like it has its own notes and scales.
 
Orphia Nay said:
Does this apply to other traditions such as Chinese music, though? That always sounds to me like it has its own notes and scales.
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Classical Asian music is quite different, yes. Modern Asian music is heavily influenced by the European tradition, but they have their own very rich histories, none of which I am familiar with.
 
arthwollipot said:
My dad tells a story about an acoustics professor at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) who would assess an auditorium by walking out into the middle, clapping loudly once, and listening to how it reverberated.
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That's a common audio engineering practice, when working in a unfamiliar room.
 
arthwollipot said:
As a trombone player I learned the harmonic sequence intimately...
...Most learning is done at the first harmonic, which is a Bb an octave above that.
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French horns work the same way. You can play the entire major scale in the second octave without touching a valve and that gets you the natural harmonic sequence, not the twelfth root of 2. My arms are too short to play trombone, but I own one.

arthwollipot said:
This is because brass instruments are not tuned to Equal Temperament. They play the harmonic series that the physical construction of the instrument gives you.
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And this limited the keys in which composers could work. Old French horns had different "crooks" you could fit to them to change the key.

arthwollipot said:
All brass instruments have this sharp fourth harmonic. In valved instruments like trumpets and horns, each valve has its own little tuning slide, and you hold your instrument with your finger in the loop attached to the slide so that you can make this adjustment on the fly.
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My trumpet has this for the third valve, but I've never seen or played a French horn that had a finger loop on the individual valve tuning slides. They have to be tuned statically.

arthwollipot said:
My dad tells a story about an acoustics professor at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) who would assess an auditorium by walking out into the middle, clapping loudly once, and listening to how it reverberated.
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Yep, that's an old trick. Not really a trick, I guess. But you want a sharp, loud sound so that all you hear after it is reverb. I did this in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and counted a 7-second decay.

arthwollipot said:
Since there are some very fast organ pieces it's not so much about the pitch changing, but about harmonising with the reverberations. Also, because they are loud, they set up resonances in other pipes and structures. So the sound of a pipe organ is extremely complex and multilayered.
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Indeed! I've been playing pipe organs since I was 14 and building them for slightly less. My home shop is a mishmash of airplane parts and pipe organ parts. We all learned the string node illustration as the putative model for how an air column vibrates in a pipe, but as you say it fails to fully describe either the physics or the experience. I've been blessed to live in a city with so many world-class instruments and builders in it, but also to have played some of the delightful instruments all over the world.

Organs have specific stops to reinforce the harmonics. You see them labeled with names like Quint and Tierce, and their "foot" markings include fractions because they're not just in octaves. There are also "mixtures" with roman numerals instead of foot markings describing how many overtones they reinforce. There's a particular combination of flue pipes called a "cornet" (French pronunciation) that creates a particularly brassy sound out of these overtone-producing pitches. But in the larger sense, the power of an organ's sound comes from explicitly reinforcing the harmonic series.

For people who don't have a cathedral nearby, there's a technology solution called Hauptwerk that uses digitally sampled actual organs, recorded in the space where the organ lives. They sample every pipe, every stop. And then you can just use MIDI technology to play. I'm currently making a console for Hauptwerk using the pedalboard from a 1915 Kimball and the manuals (keyboards) from a 1950s Balcomb and Vaughan. You use touchscreen displays for the stop jambs. But the point is that the pipe organ is the only instrument I know of that exists specifically in the space for which it was designed and is meant to be heard just there.

arthwollipot said:
This is, of course, the best organ piece ever written:

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That's debatable. It's certainly the most well-known, and it's said Bach liked it.

arthwollipot said:
Here's another thing about church organs. Prior to electronic control, where pressing a key activates an electrical mechanism that opens or closes the various pipes, there was a delay between pressing a key and hearing the sound. So an organist had to constantly play ahead of the music.
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You're half right.

The so-called "tracker" actions are purely mechanical and they are instantly responsive. That's the oldest action you get, and many organs are still built this way because frankly we like the touch. The largest such organ in our town is in the Catholic cathedral, but there's also one on Temple Square in one of the smaller buildings that's an absolute joy to play. And speaking as an engineer, it's almost mechanical-engineering porn to see how they work—all still made mostly from wood and leather lovingly crafted.

The problem is that in large organs, the mechanical couplings that allow you to play many pipes from a single keyboard, the increasing friction of large-scale actions, and the generally higher wind pressures make the actions much heavier as you pile on sound. The famous French builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll employed a mechanism call the Barker lever that cleverly used the organ's own wind pressure to actuate the heavier parts of the action. This introduced a slight delay because it'a a kind of two-stage process, but I didn't notice much when I played briefly at St. Sulpice.

Direct-electric actions are possible, and used in smaller organs. But for large organs the current required to operate all the solenoids is frankly heinous. So must actions today are still electropneumatic. The key action is electric, but the chest action is still a staged pneumatic process not unlike the Barker lever, call the Pitman chest. The famous organ in the Mormon Tabernacle works this way and it is very responsive.

The delay you're thinking of is mostly in the hall. For many organs, the worst place to hear them from is the console. When you play the Tabernacle organ, most of the sound goes over your head. Similarly for the west-end organs in the big French cathedrals, all the sound goes out over your head. What you hear is therefore the returning sound being fed back to you by reverb, and that's substantially delayed. The Tabernacle organ has discreetly hidden monitor speakers in the console so you can hear the sound as it's produced in the case, not as it's given back to you by that blasted dome. None of this has to do with older actions being slower than newer ones, which isn't generally the case if you are talking about trackers versus electropneumatics.

A second-order effect comes from the size of the largest pipes. If you stomp on the low C pedal at St. Sulpice, the 32′ Bombarde takes a noticeable fraction of a second to come up to speech. The large Bourdons are similar. This is not because of delay in the action, but rather how long it takes the physics of tone production to develop in such large containers.
 
arthwollipot said:
That's not actually all that unusual. I never played clarinet, but oboe and flute also have different fingerings for the higher registers. It's something something because you have to overblow to get a higher harmonic wave.
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No. The clarinet does something completely different for the highest notes. It doesn't use an octave key for them, which puts the notes up a whole octave, it puts them up 12 whole notes, that is, an octave and a fifth. That makes it more versatile and harder to play.

Adjustments for harmonics that are slightly out of tune are another matter.
 
If I had to write a short exam answer on that, I'd get the marks. But I don't understand it.

The flute is an open pipe with a cylindrical bore. The oboe is a closed pipe with a conical bore. Both overblow the octave. The first and second octaves on the flute are fingered almost identically. (Hitting the harmonic you want can be tricky sometimes.) The clarinet is a closed pipe with a cylindrical bore. The first octave, I'm told, is fingered as a C instrument, and the second as a G instrument. Or the other way round. And that can't be quite right anyway.

See, I told you I didn't understand it.

To compound the issue the recorder has a cylindrical bore, but narrowing rather than widening. Also an open pipe. And it overblows the octave (with the thumb-hole partly open).

The baroque flute is similar. Except our musical director pointed out that the baroque flute has a cylindrical head joint. And the Böhm flute has a conical head joint. How would I know, I just play them.

One day he announced that if you completely cover the embouchure of a Böhm flute by blowing it like a brass instrument, you convert it to a closed pipe and it will sound an octave lower. But the subsequent attempt at a practical demonstration of this was an abject failure.
 
There was a study recently, currently in preprint, called "What's Brown and Sticky? Peering Into the Ineluctable Comedic Mystery of Dad Humor with a Handful of Machine Learning Models, Hundreds of Humans, and Tens of Thousands of Dad Jokes" by Paul J. Silvia at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Meriel I. Burnett at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

This study looked at what makes a dad joke funny, and who finds them the funniest. It did so by scraping over 32,000 jokes from the /r/dadjokes subreddit and performing statistical analyses of them based on the number of upvotes and comments, based on certain topical keywords and structural elements. Then it correlated funniness with certain demographic types by surveying several hundred people.

The results are complicated and you can find the paper by typing "what's brown and sticky?" into Google Scholar, but there is one key takeaway:

Who finds dad jokes the most funny?

Dads.
 
I don't know the theory behind it but this popped up on my FB feed, and it's an illusion I've never seen before.
Move your phone or laptop around a bit and the ball seems to move. It's not a video, an app, or a gif, just a static picture.
It has something to do with the surrounding QR Code-looking thing because if you block that out the motion doesn't happen.

Screenshot_20260103_000246_Samsung Internet-a.jpg
 
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