what makes a chanter sound like it sounds?

[MarcusR]

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.

I agree Simon, pacinian corpuscles are very sensitive receptors for mechanical vibrations that can detect vibrations ~ hundreds of Hertz. I doubt that the stimuli from such a signal would be interpreted as a vibration. From the limited knowledge I have in sensory physiology I believe that these kind of experiments is carried out with signal bursts of 100-300 Hz at a prf of 1-50 Hz. Even though the receptors can detect the high frequency signals I think it is the low burst rate that is interpreted as a vibration.

... amazing what you find out learning the pipes.

Very true and I have often been amazed by combined knowledge in fields far from ITM, by the contributers of this forum.

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

Tickeling the elbow never worked with my kids. Bring it up in the armpit, there are more nerv cells there

/MarcusR

[DIAGONALINE]

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.

Newby alert
I have felt the vibration in the column of air, It felt like juggling with a living thing, I cannot report it helped with my playing but it was a great feeling.
In relation to the Liam O'Flynn quote above it is obvious that the player acts as a sound board so the fact that my father was Irish the sound travels through my well muscled Gaelic body and comes out with a thousand years of Celtic harmonics.

Yeah right.

Les.

[sean an piobaire]

To Kevin Rietmannn: Thanks, Kevin, for the "magic" Coyne reed info re-up!
Yes, I HAVE encountered this throbing air-column in other pipes (but not the Biniou Koz! Not enough length of chanter?. The 3 different sizes of all double reeded Zampogna (G / Eb / C ) and the Calabrian Surdulina, which has single reeds about the size of GHB tenor drone reeds. The Hungarian Duda which has narrow bore, small cane single reeds. The Polish Slask Gajdy which has composite single reeds with cane tongues...this is not the complete list and it's true that my "perceived" vibration is of a low frequentcy Hertz. Perhaps Interference Harmonics? A low "resultant" is most noticeable when,playing
on PIPE ORGANS, 2 LOW notes of a tonic and it's fifth, (say low C and G), are beating against each other, an even lower "Resultant" is heard and/or FELT, if it's played low enough on the Organ keyboard. I don't think my finger sensitivity is in anyway "Extra- Ordinary", I don't think I'd be a good safe-cracker! Great info everybody! Sean Folsom

[The Sporting Pitchfork]

Enjoyed Bill's graphs. Funnily enough, I had been looking at some very similar spectrogram analyses the other day for my phonetics class...from a dialect study of men from Philadelphia! That ebony chanter has some nice mid-back rounded vowels goin' on the first octave A...

[Jim McGuire]

After playing his Strad in concert, Menuhin was approached backstage. "Your Strad sounds just fantastic!" Menuhin leaned down and put his ear by his instrument and said "I don't hear a thing."

[simonknight]

I agree Simon, pacinian corpuscles are very sensitive receptors for mechanical vibrations that can detect vibrations ~ hundreds of Hertz. I doubt that the stimuli from such a signal would be interpreted as a vibration. From the limited knowledge I have in sensory physiology I believe that these kind of experiments is carried out with signal bursts of 100-300 Hz at a prf of 1-50 Hz. Even though the receptors can detect the high frequency signals I think it is the low burst rate that is interpreted as a vibration.

Went back and tried it again. I cetainly can't detect any feeling of pitch. Some some notes seem to vibrate with a different intensity and quality, also variable with bag pressure as a note comes into tune or most resonant frequency.

One thing in this most unscientific experiment - as I relax my fingertips I can feel the vibration from the hole, not the chanter leading me to think i'm feeling the air column not the wood vibrating.

[billh]

... Funnily enough, I had been looking at some very similar spectrogram analyses the other day for my phonetics class...from a dialect study of men from Philadelphia!

Thanks Sport

While we're way off in theoretical wonderland, it occurs to me that perhaps we humans have evolved to be especially sensitive to exactly these sorts of harmonic spectra and especially time-based changes of harmonics, because of their importance in language?

Throughout history, musical instruments which are in some way reminiscent of the human voice have been especially prized. Perhaps this explains why effects which may be quaititatively small are so subjectively important, if they are related to the acoustic phenomena which we use to recognize various vowels. (consonants too, I suppose, with regard to ornamentation and "attack transients" of notes).

This also brings to mind one of my other favorite hobby-horses, lilting, which I think has a unique value in tune transmission, retention, and teaching. I am not a lilter myself but I have often felt that lilting may be the ideal way to teach pipe tunes (just as syllabic chanting is a primary means of teaching Tabla and other parts of the Indian Classical tradition).

regards

Bill

[bwilson]

I'm another newbie but I'll chime in anyway. Despite my technical background, I'm not very optimistic about answering these questions theoretically. The behavior of a reed and chanter seems far too complicated to understand without lots of experimentation. The kind of information that billh posted is a great start, but there are a lot of questions to answer and the experiments are hard to do -- not many of us have the ability to produce identical chanters made from various materials. I've played around with a few spectral analyses of drones, and I quickly decided that my ear can tell me what sounds good much better than my computer can! (Which is not to say that spectral analysis is worthless, since it seems like it might help us better understand what is going on inside the reed/chanter.)

I had a fantastic opportunity to compare ebony vs. boxwood chanters at the most recent So. California tionol. I was placing an order for a B set from Michael Hubbert, and he had two of his B chanters with him that I could try out. As a beginner (playing for about 2 years now), and based on things I read here (e.g., wood contributes 1% of the tone), I did not expect to be able to hear much difference between these chanters. I was quite surprised then to hear a distinct difference between these two chanters, even when played with the same reed. Others with me at the time noticed the difference as well. (Interestingly, everyone else preferred the ebony but I liked the boxwood.) Of course, there's always the possibility that these chanters were not truly identical. I don't recall Michael making a definitive statement about that, but he did seem to imply that they were more or less the same. Anyway, that's hardly scientific but it is empirical data and I was surprised by the difference. As I remember David Quinn posted some comments in this forum about similar experiments, but I did not expect my untrained ears to be able to hear any difference....

Anyway, if you ever get an opportunity to compare identical chanters made of different materials, do try it out! You might be surprised.

[fgibbons]

All this talk of what a chanter sounds like reminds me of a visit to Koehler & Quinn a few years ago, to get a new bag tied in. Mr Q was working away on something, while Mr K and I chatted, as he tied in the bag, and then tuned up my drones.

At one point, Mr Q says "Hey, do you hear that? There it is again." In the following ten minutes, I learned about (and heard) a particular harmonic caused by interaction of the drones that doesn't really "radiate" as a physicist would use the term (that is, it doesn't in principle propagate out to indefinite distances, losing amplitude all the way). Rather, it is only audible in a sphere-like shell around the instrument, at a particular radius.

Interestingly, the player him/herself cannot hear that particular harmonic, since the "sphere" in which it exists has a radius of something like five feet. (I know Mr Q visits this forum from time to time, he could describe much better than I can, perhaps he will.) What I think it illustrates is how difficult it can be to get accurate acoustic measurements on an instrument, and how much MORE difficult it can be to compare measurements made by different people. Not that we shouldn't try, but it can be infuriatingly difficult to do so! Great discussion though!

[Amac]

Now then lets hear all the sentimentalist arguments against....
uilliam

If you can feel the chanter vibrate in your hands then some of that energy from the vibrating column of air is passing into the wood (or other material).

The nature of that material (including its surface) will control exactly which amounts of which frequencies are removed from the column of air. It may even put some altered energy back into the air column. And thus the material will have an effect on sound quality.

David

hi david did you enjoy the tionol at tintagel, it was good to meet you & brian mcnamara was a really nice guy, hope your well

[sean an piobaire]

This sound bubble that "fgibbons" alludes to, makes it hard to properly "mike" the pipes. Early on, I had to suspend a single microphone slightly forward, and overhead, to get near to the sound I wanted from a recording. Manys the time I thought I heard the telephone ring, while practicing, stop to listen, and realize that it was the pipes' own harmonic interactions jingling away (jingle bell pipes,Gawd). It's also true that it's good to have somebody else play your pipes, so you're NOT on top of them, and can hear what they sound like, at a distance (usualy much sweeter). Musical sound is like smoke on the breeze, and most of it ..goes UP!
Brian Howard's pipes actualy sound a little louder and carry farther, than when you're playing them. I met the Sheffield man recently, in 2000 and 2001, he came to Mendocino, after visiting Remo Drum manufacturing in Los Angeles, where they make his "Brian Howard bodhran", in their "ethnic percussion" offering. Well One Week till Xmas! Jingle those pipes!
Sean Folsom

[MJS]

<Manys the time I thought I heard the telephone ring, while practicing, stop to listen, and realize that it was the pipes' own harmonic interactions jingling away (jingle bell pipes,Gawd).>


HAH - and I thought I was going mad! I've heard this as well (particularly with smallpipes, with drones going and in tune!). Is this a common experience?
m.

[simonknight]

Same here - always seems to be coming from behind me.

[ausdag]

The original post asked about the sound of the chanter in a recording as being softer or mellower and what made this particular recording sound the way it did (he said chanter, but it's the recording more than anything in this case)?

The other aspect to all this is that these days many pipers tend to compress the heck out of their chanter sound in the studio so that it sounds nothing like it would in real life. Compare recordings of the old masters - Rowsome, Reck, Clancy etc and how their recordings sound much more like a chanter in real life than many modern recordings - Keenan for example.

Being an isolated piper it was a while before I came in contact with other pipers and was surprised to hear just what different makers' chanters sounded like 'in the flesh' when others were playing them in front of me rather than all that I had heard until then - either my own chanter from behind (me playing it that is) or studio recordings of filtered and compressed chanters.

Maybe it's because this 'compressed' sound is what we as the piper hear moreso than what the audience hears and so we adjust our recording output accordingly.

DavidG

[sean an piobaire]

Yes I believe that compression knocks off some(or most of it, if the dial is way over) of the high overtones and most recording engineers (even those few that haven't had their ears "blown-out" by recording rock bands) prefer to use it, as they are deathly afraid of the word "bagpipe" and all the "freight" that it conjures in the minds of these uninformed, self -appointed arbiters of "taste". THEY KNOW the GENERAL AUDIENCE DOESN"T LIKE BAGPIPES...so compress the recording or put that Bagggpipe way back in the mix, even if it's supposed to be a solo. It's one of the factors that have lead us to the boring, insipid, atmos---t, on one hand, and the crashing, jet take-off, boiler factory, on the other, polarized, extreme.
Been there, read the book, saw the film, bought the T-shirt! S.F.