Playability in flute-like instruments: Investigating the relation between flute making and instrumental control

The musician’s ability to modify the pitch of his instrument is a common feature for most instruments from the flute family. Musicians can alter a given note by adjusting the airjet velocity or by changing the resonator impedance through the modification of the embouchure (opening or closing the open end of the resonator where the embouchure is). A trained musician can adapt to a wide variety of instruments and even correct the pitch of poorly built instruments. Flute makers, on the other hand, propose a pitch structure (diapason) by placing the tone holes, adapting their size and height and by choosing the bore’s internal geometry. The choices made by the maker take into account the musician’s evaluation, creating a loop that through centuries of iterations has produced optimal instruments following a range of cultural and technological constraints. Throughout this article, the relationship between flute manufacture and the musician’s control will be discussed and analyzed. Identifying, modeling and quantifying the possibilities the musician has to control the instrument as well as the parameters the flute maker can modify to close this optimization loop, we propose a methodology to determine the geometry of the instrument for a given control strategy and vice versa.