THE 'VIRTUAL FLUTE': ACOUSTIC MODELLING AT THE SERVICE OF PLAYERS AND COMPOSERS
Andrew Botros, John R. Lindsay Smith, Joe Wolfe · 2003
Among the difficulties facing woodwind players are (i) awkward fingerings for rapid passages, (ii) intonation defects in instruments, and (iii) performing exotic effects such as microtones and multiphonics. In many cases these may be ameliorated by alternative fingerings. We report the construction and use of a web service for the flute. An expert system was trained by an experienced flutist to determine playability from features of 957 minima in measured acoustic impedance spectra Z(f) for 76 selected fingerings. Measurements on successively more complicated acoustic systems yielded an accurate waveguide model of Z(f) of the flute, which generated the minima of the 39,744 different acoustic configurations of the flute. The expert system, coupled with the waveguide model, produces a large database of alternative fingerings, microtone and multiphonic fingerings. The database is accessible to flutists and composers via a user-friendly interface that includes user determined constraints on key combinations and ranks fingerings by playability or pitch. This service, located at