Woodwind design uses microwave theory

Author

Jackson, Charlie

Author_Institution

Ditrans Corp., Irvine, CA, USA

Volume

2

Issue

3

fYear

2001

fDate

9/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

45

Lastpage

49

Abstract

Woodwind musical instruments consist of holes and tubes that enable a musician to play different notes. Woodwinds can be modeled with open holes as short circuits and tubes as transmission lines. An instrument can be designed by modeling all of the sections and fingering configurations. Transmission-line approximations and cascaded transmission-line theory can be used to model woodwind instruments, such as the flute, crumhorn and cornetto. In fact, the same transmission-line equations and approach of breaking a circuit into small sections are used for microwave circuit design. In this article, this approach is applied to design a crumhorn using commercially available Lucite tubing. After fabrication, good agreement is obtained between the measured performance and the theoretical predictions

Keywords

cascade networks; musical instruments; transmission line theory; Lucite tubing; cascaded transmission-line theory; cornetto; crumhorn; fingering configurations; flute; microwave theory; musical instruments; transmission-line approximations; woodwind design; Bones; Boring; Distributed parameter circuits; Equations; Humans; Instruments; Microwave circuits; Microwave theory and techniques; Transmission line theory; Transmission lines;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Microwave Magazine, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1527-3342

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/6668.951548

Filename

951548