what makes a chanter sound like it sounds?

[Jim McGuire]

In my experience of the "finger massage" of an "extra -vibratory" chanter air column, (which is a very rare experience for me, I can say that I have only encountered it 5 times in my life as a piper, now going on 36 years), I found in each case, that the reed had everything to do with it. When the "fantastic reed" was pulled out and another reed put in it's place, the massage stopped. There have been even rarer times when the bag itself, vibrated with the back pressure off one of those "magic" reeds. Comments, anybody?
Molecules -in Motion Sean Folsom

Sounds like the C SPOT is elusive! Nice report, though, on what goes on out there on the West Coast. I've heard a lot of names for it but never heard the "fantastic reed"!

[billh]

Hello!...

On wood influence of tonal quality; to be able to radiate sound efficiently, the vibrating object needs to be at least ½ the wavelength of the frequency to be radiated This is due to acoustic "shourt-circuit", the air decies to go to the backside of the object instead of radieating. With the speed of sound at 340m/s, at 20kHz(upper frequency limit of hearing) the wavelength is 1.7cm, 10kHz is 3.4 cm, 5kHz 6.8 cm, I would suspect that the wood can't have much influence on frquencies below 5 kHz, but that might be enough to get differences in tonal quality.

best wishes Anders

HI Anders:

While true, I doubt the above observation is relevant to our case since we are not concerned with radiant transmission by the wooden walls, but rather with damping properties and any effects of the wall material on the acoustic impedance (the latter are supposedly quite small, the former are poorly characterized).

Bill

[Pekkos]

Hi Bill

Agree with you that that must be a more important issue. Have there been measurements of the impedance of this kind on instruments? I have seen and also been part of measuring different impedances and mobilities of a predecessor of the harpsichord (called Virginal), very interesting but not the same area. To me it seems like the surface of the bore should make the biggest difference, would it be possible to do the same measurement as you did before and after oiling the bore of a chanter?

best wishes, Anders

(currently thinking of an experimental setup to measure the acoustic impeadance of a chanter without having a reed involved, since it seems like there is so much interaction between the chanter and the reed...)

[djm]

You could go on and on forever researching the permutations of this. What about making everything the same on multiple chanters, and all of the same wood (preferably all from the same hunk of timber), and measuring for the effects of different thicknesses of the chanter wall? - and differences for varying the chanter wall only at specific locations? It would also be interesteing to compare different types of plastic to see how close you could come to imitating expensive woods like ebony or AFB, e.g. resin versus delrin, and could you modify the plastic chanter to come close to ebony?

I hope you're rich, Bill.

djm

[oleorezinator]

So, what makes it sound like that? The reed, the wood, the bore? Or a combination of everything? Is it possible to aim to make a chanter with a specific sound, or is it a kind of "gambling"?

The reed and the piper and his/her style of playing makes it sounds like that.
If you're looking for a specific sound and consider all the factors that contribute to that sound I think you can roughly break it up in: reed 50%, bore 25%, piper/playing style 24%, wood 1%.

The recording process is also a big factor, I think compression is used in this case. And the piper is playing the 'overdrive' setup style like Keenan.

All the best,
Evertjan

liam o' flynn at a workshop in philadelphia, told a story about a tional in ireland where seamus ennis offered his pipes to anyone who wanted to play them. o'flynn sais that all those who played the set made it sound distinct from one another in the sense of timbre.

[benwalker]

Interesting discussion.
I swapped the same reed from the ebony chanter in the clip and played it in the Holly Chanter I have recently aquired.There was a difference in tonal qualities but quite subtle.slightly mellower in my opinion.

[Joseph E. Smith]

...preferably all from the same hunk of timber...

.... the wood, as in cane, cannot be counted on for having the same consistency of density throughout.... so there's one less expense Bill.

[srfmowman]

In my experience of the "finger massage" of an "extra -vibratory" chanter air column, (which is a very rare experience for me, I can say that I have only encountered it 5 times in my life as a piper, now going on 36 years), I found in each case, that the reed had everything to do with it. When the "fantastic reed" was pulled out and another reed put in it's place, the massage stopped. There have been even rarer times when the bag itself, vibrated with the back pressure off one of those "magic" reeds. Comments, anybody?

Although I barely have my toe into the water compared to Sean, I remember the first time my chanter vibrated while playing. It was a "lightbulb" moment for me. I went from trying to make a reed be loud or quiet and changed to finding that "happy spot" instead. Where the reed is in tune and makes the chanter, bag, and drones all vibrate. Perhaps it is easier for this to occur in the dry air, because I have had this numerous times. In fact, when Alan Burton sent me a reed I put it in the chanter and it was indeed in its "happy spot".

[sean an piobaire]

To PEKKOS: Yes the vibrations are there all the time, but what I'm talking about is that really VIBRATORY air column, inside the chanter,that you feel through your fingers over the tone holes, as a throbing, really active, air column, and it is very pronounced on the lower right hand notes: G F# E and D. Presumably the bore is trumpeting the "vibes" a little more, as you descend the scale and gain more cone effects. As to the vibrations inside the bag itself, I've always wondered if there is some acousticaly resonant frequentcy that the bag will couple with, IF it's the right size and shape? Come on, Brain-boxes, some formulae for calculating the Right Bag Interior Volume needed for the different keys, D, C, B, etc. ?
As a violin player, I'm sure you know about the practice violin makers do, of singing into the body of the violin through the "F" holes, and the note that most violins are supposed to couple with is "B" just below middle "C" on the piano? The guitar and lute bodies of my Hungarian and French Hurdy Gurdies do it, Guitars do it,.. lets do it, let's resonate with love?....!
(and wolf tones)? and I can't stop.....Wooff tones...sorry Mr. Geoff!
That's the resonance vibration that I talking about, with respect to the UP chanter. To Mr. McGuire: Jim, it seems that the most "fantastic" reed that I've read about on other threads on this forum, is the 140 year-old Coyne reed, from Australia, that plays well in any length of chanter its plugged into (with a few untried exceptions) My question, Bill (h), does this "fantastic reed", give the fingers of the piper a "massage"?
Ringing like a bell, I am, Sean, An Piobaire.

[Gabriel]

Wow, what an interesting discussion. Thanks to all of you, I still have to translate some specific terms to german.

(...pleasant activity on a sunday's night when you have to get up for university at 08:00 am and are unable to get some sleep...)

Special thanks to Bill for that monster reply.

[Jim McGuire]

I thought the reed worked in different length narrow-bore chanters.

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

Yes, Craig said his reed worked in various odd old chanters, best in Kenna and Coyne, suggesting some strong family resemblance bore-wise there. The reed came from Craig's keyless Coyne D, which had a bent reed seat - and the staple of the reed was bent to match, so you knew it had to be tailor-made for that chanter. Craig also wrote about visiting a family in Kildare who bought a set from the Coynes with six-count' em-six regulators, and no drones - to play in church no less, and the set had never left the family. The reeds in that set looked just like Craig's, more evidence on the heap.
Now, are you just talking about shuddering UPs, Sean? Hey Sean! Shud UP! Nyuk nyuk. Anyway, spinach chin, have you gotten similiar vibes off other bagpipes, like that Breton Screaming Mimi-like-the-Wehrmacht-never -dreamt-of, the biniou? Surely it would be easy to test various bags on these pipes. Just head on down to the dog pound...raid the nearest goatherd...

[MarcusR]

Interesting discussion

Many wise thoughts have been brought up in this thread but as Bill said this is a very difficult and to my knowledge still an unsolved question.

Bill, I think you are right about the variance on the microscopic level of different wall materials affecting the boundary layers and the viscous drag of the vibrating air column. I would also believe that thermal effects and thermal conductivity of the wall material is negligible for a bellow blown chanter under the assumption that the air temperature in the room and bellows are in equilibrium (not the case for mouth blown chanter or flutes).

But even though I agree with the fact that the microscopic roughness will affect the attenuation of harmonics I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that this is an effect of the type of wood, especially as we are discussion suitable woods. The reason is that for the microscopic level there must surly be as much variation between different pieces of Ebony depending of place of growth, age, growth rate, what piece of the log is used etc as there is between two pieces of Ebony and Boxwood.
This is why I dont agree that one type has a specific tonality, much of it could be compensated for in in the making process and other factors should be more dominat.

Everything we hear from the chanter has to be created by the nonlinearities in the flow through the reed and no harmonics are created in the chanter itself. I agree that the combined macroscopic and microscopic properties will act as frequency dependant attenuator.
One thing you could check Bill is to measure the power spectrum form the same chanter with the bore a little bit rough and then highly polished (just minor changes so that geometry is not affected). Any roughness should reduce the amount of harmonics due to increased attenuation with higher frequencies.
I just browsed through your spectrums and it is hard to get a good feeling about the energy distribution as magnitudes are not comparable. If you have the data available it could be a good idea to measure the spectral centroid (first momentum divided by the zero momentum of the power spectrum) for the different notes of the two chanters (like center of mass in frequency domain). Keeping track of the total energy is also important as measurements of sound radiation from instruments are a bit tricky.
A very interesting study Bill, I’m sure you got something good going on there.

Feeling the vibrations from the air column:
I have heard other mention these vibrations that Sean and Pekkos are talking about, but I have only felt them myself on a few rare occasions playing a flute. However, I doubt very much that what you feel is the vibrating air column. If the nerve system in the skin could pick up vibrations in the range of hundreds of Hertz we wouldn’t need ears. It is more likely that these vibrations sensed are spatial superposition of waves creating resonances with frequencies less than 50 Hertz.

If woodwind acoustics is not difficult as it is we can also ad the concept of human perception. Why do we characterize one sound as brighten than another? Increased volume or intensity, increased number of harmonics, combination of certain harmonics or slight shifts of the central frequency? The brain has an amazing ability to fill in the missing information before interpretation.

Let see what comes out of this, maybe Bill or some one else here at C&F will have a nice little article in the Journal of Applied Acoustics in the future. That would be cool.

/MarcusR

[simonknight]

Feeling the vibrations from the air column:
I have heard other mention these vibrations that Sean and Pekkos are talking about, but I have only felt them myself on a few rare occasions playing a flute. However, I doubt very much that what you feel is the vibrating air column. If the nerve system in the skin could pick up vibrations in the range of hundreds of Hertz we wouldn’t need ears. It is more likely that these vibrations sensed are spatial superposition of waves creating resonances with frequencies less than 50 Hertz.


/MarcusR

I was pretty sure that I was consistently feeling vibrations on my concert chanter. After reading this thread I payed attention to this phenomenon and found it is very noticable. Less so, but still present on my C and B flat chanters. It's most noticable at a finger pressure that is the minimum necessary to seal the hole, just before a leak is created.

The skin obviously can't compete with the ears but I'm not sure I agree with the statement that it can't pick up vibrations in the range of hundreds of Hertz. There's plenty out there on skin sensitivity to vibration. The Meissner corpuscles function primarily as velocity detectors and are only senstive to about 40 hertz, but Pacinian corpuscles are sensitive bewteen 200Hz -350 Hz. There's a whole field called Haptic Perception realted to sensitivity and perception via the skin- amazing what you find out learning the pipes.

Can't feel anything in the bag - must have insentitive elbows.

[glands]

I'm starting to believe that Bill H and David Quinn are from the same mold. Interesting commentary, as usual, Bill.